Joint QoS provisioning and congestion control for multi-hop wireless networks

Abstract

The capability of quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning is of particular importance for multi-hop wireless networks when the real-time applications boost in current days. The scheduling and delivery of data packets in a deficient method may probably cause network congestion, which will in turn decrease the capability of QoS provisioning in the network. To this end, we propose a joint QoS provisioning and congestion control scheme for multi-hop wireless network in this paper based on our previous works of Differentiated Queueing Service (DQS) and Semi-TCP, which provide per-packet granular QoS and carry out efficient hop-by-hop congestion control, respectively. While DQS and Semi-TCP are studied separately, we investigate the arising issues in the joint scheme and propose possible solutions accordingly, including a fast estimation of the latest departure time, a method to handle overdue packets, and an adaptive ACK scheme, as well as the design of a shared database cross-layer architecture for the implementation in the protocol stack. Simulation results show that our proposal improves the network performance in terms of goodput, delivery ratio, and end-to-end delay significantly, particularly in the scenario of mobile users. Our discussion and simulation results both indicate that the proposed joint scheme is flexible and adaptive to the dynamic multi-hop wireless network environment.