Wireless Congestion Control Protocol For Multihop Ad Hoc Networks

The traditional TCP congestion control mechanism encounters a number of new problems and suffers a poor performance when the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol is used in multihop ad hoc networks. Many of the problems result from medium contention at the MAC layer. In this paper, I first illustrate that severe medium contention and congestion are intimately coupled, and TCP’s congestion control algorithm becomes too coarse in its granularity, causing throughput instability and excessively long delay. Further, we illustrate TCP’s severe unfairness problem due to the medium contention and the tradeoff between aggregate throughput and fairness. Then, based on the novel use of channel busyness ratio, a more accurate metric to characterize the network utilization and