Starvation-Avoidance Routing Assignment for Multihop Wireless Networks

Abstract

A distributed coordination function is a serial fundamental media access control (MAC) mechanism of the IEEE 802.11 wireless network standards for accessing a medium and reducing the probability of collisions. Before sending data, each sender must check whether the medium is available. However, asymmetric detection and collision-avoidance mechanisms create transmission starvation problems. Hence, this paper addresses starvation problems to improve the quality of service in multihop wireless networks by adapting the transmission power range and carrier-sense threshold to alleviate starvation problems and to improve system performance. The problem is modelled as a mathematical formulation, and a Lagrangian relaxation (LR) approach is applied to obtain the approximation solution. The performance of the proposed algorithm is verified by applying it to several simulated starvation-avoidance routing problems. The results show that the proposed algorithm can near-optimally solve these problems, with an average lower bound–upper bound gap of 12.4%.