Stability and Delay Consideration for Flow Control over Wireless Networks

In this paper we develop a general framework for the problem of flow control over wireless networks, evaluate the existing approaches within that framework, and propose new ones. Significant progress has been made on the mathematical modeling of flow control for the wired Internet, among which Kelly’s contribution is widely accepted as a standard framework. We extend Kelly’s flow control framework to the wireless scenario, where the wireless link is assumed to have a fixed link capacity and a packet loss rate caused by the physical channel errors. In this framework, the problem of flow control over wireless can be formulated as a convex optimization problem with noisy feedback. We then propose two new solutions to the problem achieving optimal performance by only modifying the application layer. The global stability and the delay sensitivity of the schemes are investigated, and verified by numerical results. Our work advocates the use of multiple connections for flow, or congestion control, over wireless.