MCR: MAC‐assisted congestion‐controlled routing for wireless multihop networks

Abstract

Techniques for improving network congestion have been proposed in different fields. In recent years, the congestion control problems were studied to enhance the routing performance in wireless multihop networks (WMNs). In this paper, the network allocation vector (NAV) introduced by the contention‐based medium access control (MAC) protocols is utilized for the determination of the channel status around a wireless node (WN). A MAC‐assisted congestion‐controlled routing (MCR) algorithm is proposed to alleviate the network congestion problem by adopting the information from the MAC layer. The routing path is selected based on the congestion‐free probability along the path for transmitting the data packets. Moreover, the adaptive path‐switching scheme and the aggressive hop‐reduction (AHR) local repair mechanism further enhance the routing performance of the proposed MCR algorithm. The effectiveness of the MCR protocol is evaluated via both the analytical study and the simulation results. Without consuming excessive control packets for each WN, the MCR algorithm can achieve better performance when compared with other existing schemes, especially under the scenarios with network congestion. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.