TY - JOUR
T1 - Measurement and modeling of the origins of starvation of congestion-controlled flows in wireless mesh networks
AU - Gurewitz, Omer
AU - Mancuso, Vincenzo
AU - Shi, Jingpu
AU - Knightly, Edward W.
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received March 25, 2008; revised November 06, 2008; approved by IEEE/ACM TRANSACTIONS ON NETWORKING Editor A. Kumar. First published July 14, 2009; current version published December 16, 2009. This research was supported by NSF Grants CNS-0331620 and CNS-0325971 and by the Cisco Collaborative Research Initiative.
Funding Information:
He is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the DIEET, University of Palermo. He received a scholarship for his Ph.D. from the MIUR Ministery, Italy, a grant from the University of Roma “Tor Vergata” in the frame of the SATNEX network of excellence, and his position at the University of Palermo is currently funded by the MIUR. His research activities involve QoS support in access networks, QoS support for multimedia applications over the Internet, vehicular area networks, hybrid satellite and terrestrial networks, wireless mesh networks, and mesh deployments. He has participated and is currently participating in several projects funded by the European community and by the Italian government.
Funding Information:
received the B.S. degree from Auburn University, Auburn, AL, in 1991, and the M.S. and Ph.D. de-grees from the University of California at Berkeley in 1992 and 1996, respectively. He is a Professor of Electrical and Computer En-gineering at Rice University, Houston, TX. His re-search interests are in the areas of mobile and wire-less networks and high-performance and denial-of-service resilient protocol design. Prof. Knightly is a Sloan Fellow and a recipient of National Science Foundation CAREER Award. He received the best paper award from ACM MobiCom 2008. He served as Technical Co-Chair of IEEE INFOCOM 2005, General Chair of ACM MobiHoc 2009 and ACM MobiSys 2007, and served on the program committee for numerous networking conferences, including ICNP, INFOCOM, MobiCom, and SIGMETRICS. He served as Associate Editor for numerous journals and special issues, including the IEEE/ACM TRANSACTIONS ON NETWORKING and the IEEE JOURNAL ON SELECTED AREAS OF COMMUNICATIONS Special Issue on Multi-Hop Wireless Mesh Networks.
PY - 2009/12/1
Y1 - 2009/12/1
N2 - Significant progress has been made in understanding the behavior of TCP and congestion-controlled traffic over CSMA-based multihop wireless networks. Despite these advances, however, no prior work identified severe throughput imbalances in the basic scenario of mesh networks, in which a one-hop flow contends with a two-hop flow for gateway access. In this paper, we demonstrate via real network measurements, testbed experiments, and an analytical model that starvation exists in such a scenario; i.e., the one-hop flow receives most of the bandwidth, while the two-hop flow starves. Our analytical model yields a solution consisting of a simple contention window policy that can be implemented via standard mechanisms defined in IEEE 802.11e. Despite its simplicity, we demonstrate through analysis, experiments, and simulations that the policy has a powerful effect on network-wide behavior, shifting the network's queuing points, mitigating problematic MAC and transport behavior, and ensuring that TCP flows obtain a fair share of the gateway bandwidth, irrespective of their spatial location.
AB - Significant progress has been made in understanding the behavior of TCP and congestion-controlled traffic over CSMA-based multihop wireless networks. Despite these advances, however, no prior work identified severe throughput imbalances in the basic scenario of mesh networks, in which a one-hop flow contends with a two-hop flow for gateway access. In this paper, we demonstrate via real network measurements, testbed experiments, and an analytical model that starvation exists in such a scenario; i.e., the one-hop flow receives most of the bandwidth, while the two-hop flow starves. Our analytical model yields a solution consisting of a simple contention window policy that can be implemented via standard mechanisms defined in IEEE 802.11e. Despite its simplicity, we demonstrate through analysis, experiments, and simulations that the policy has a powerful effect on network-wide behavior, shifting the network's queuing points, mitigating problematic MAC and transport behavior, and ensuring that TCP flows obtain a fair share of the gateway bandwidth, irrespective of their spatial location.
KW - Experimental
KW - Fairness
KW - IEEE 802.11
KW - Mesh
KW - TCP
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=72449177857&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/TNET.2009.2019643
DO - 10.1109/TNET.2009.2019643
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:72449177857
SN - 1063-6692
VL - 17
SP - 1832
EP - 1845
JO - IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
JF - IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
IS - 6
M1 - 5164899
ER -