A weighted RED for alleviating starvation problem in wireless mesh networks

Abstract

In wireless mesh networks, the end-to-end throughput of a flow over a multiple-hop wireless link rapidly decreases as the hop-count between the source and destination nodes increases, and the flows that travel over a path of more than 4-5 hops from its source node eventually starve. To alleviate this unfairness, we propose a weighted random early detection (RED) mechanism that has a different dropping preference according to the hop-count information. When the network is congested, it forwards packets that come from a farther source node with a higher priority. Through extensive simulations, we show that the proposed queue management policy can improve the fairness performance effectively and alleviate the starvation problem in multihop wireless networks.