Ingress Throttling and its Applications in IEEE 802.11 Based MANETs

Abstract

One of the stumbling blocks which prevents multihop ad hoc networks from wide deployment is a known problem of unfair bandwidth distribution between competing data sessions. Practically, a combination of the current IEEE 802.11 technology and the standard TCP protocol allows only a couple of up to three hops connections co-exist simultaneously while providing fairly stable and acceptable service to end users. In this article we describe ingress throttling, a resource protection layer which restores fair bandwidth sharing between plain TCP as well as arbitrary UDP sources. We summarize analytical as well as simulation studies of our solution and demonstrate itsapplications for determining scaling limits of ad hoc specificsimulations and evaluating the effect of ad hoc routing onperformance of data communications.