A survey on congestion control for mobile ad hoc networks

Abstract

Congestion control is a key problem in mobile ad hoc networks. The standard congestion control mechanism of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is not able to handle the special properties of a shared wireless multi-hop channel well. In particular, the frequent changes of the network topology and the shared nature of the wireless channel pose significant challenges. Many approaches have been proposed to overcome these difficulties. In this paper, we give an overview over existing proposals, explain their key ideas and show their interrelations. CopyrightIn a network with shared resources, where multiple senders compete for link bandwidth, it is necessary to adjust the data rate used by each sender in order not to overload the network. Packets that arrive at a router and cannot be forwarded are dropped. Consequently, an excessive amount of packets arriving at a network bottleneck leads to many packet drops. These dropped packets might already have traveled a long way in the network and thus consumed significant resources. Additionally, the lost packets often trigger retransmissions, which means that even more packets are sent into the network. Thus network congestion can severely deteriorate network throughput. If no appropriate congestion control is performed, this can lead to a congestion collapse of the network, where almost no data is successfully delivered. Such a situation occurred on the early Internet, leading to the development of the TCP congestion control mechanism [5]. TCP Congestion ControlOn the Internet, congestion control is in the responsibility of the transport layer, more precisely of

A Model for Congestion Control of Transmission Control Protocol in Mobile Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

“…If the link layer abandons its attempts at link-level retransmission, TCP takes the loss as a congestion indicator. This misinterpretation of packet loss due to wireless channel error as congestion has badly affected TCP performance (Boukerche, 2008;Ahmed et al, 2004;Lochert et al, 2007). Therefore, there is a need for a detection mechanism to correctly interpret the loss as corruption instead of congestion (Habbal and Hassan, 2011).…”

“…• Statement A-low knowledge of wireless error loss has negative impact on TCP performance (Boukerche, 2008;Lochert et al, 2007;Habbal and Hassan, 2010;) (i.e., poor throughput); this statement is represented by Link A in Fig. 3. …”

Energy optimization for proactive unicast route maintenance in MANETs under end-to-end reliability requirements

“…Apart from this, in traditional networks and MANETs, congestion control has been in-troduced at the transport layer, which regulates the data traffic based on the network condition [1] [15]. In contrast, the proposed optimization in this paper varies the control traffic at the network layer with respect to the network condition and data traffic rate.…”

Packet Loss Differentiation Over Manet Based on a BP Neural Network

“…MANETs have peculiar characteristics including dynamic network topology, asymmetry, multi-hop communication, and limited bandwidth and energy resources. These characteristics complicate quality of service (QoS) provision, and impose various challenges in the design of congestion control [11]. Wired transport layer protocols tend to achieve congestion control, low control, and end-to-end delivery of data packets.…”