DISTRIBUTED SOLUTIONS FOR RATE CONTROL AND MAXIMUM LIFETIME IN WIRELESS NETWORKS By LIANG ZHANG A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

of dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy DISTRIBUTED SOLUTIONS FOR RATE CONTROL AND MAXIMUM LIFETIME IN WIRELESS NETWORKS By Liang Zhang August 2009 Chair: Shigang Chen Major: Computer Engineering This study focuses on end-to-end flow rate fairness and lifetime fairness in wireless networks. In recent years, the advent of multihop wireless networks has greatly accelerated the research on bandwidth management in such networks to support new applications. While much research concentrates on the MAC layer, the users perception on these networks is however determined mainly based on the networks end-to-end effectiveness. It is important for us to develop flexible tools for traffic engineering in multihop wireless networks. In this study, two solutions are proposed to achieve end-to-end maxmin flow rate fairness in such networks. A cross-layer design is firstly proposed for achieving end-to-end maxmin fairness in wireless mesh networks. In this approach, a generalized maxmin model is first proposed for multihop wireless networks. At the network layer, our design allocates network capacity to end-to-end flows for maxmin bandwidth allocation. At the MAC layer, our design achieves the allocated bandwidth shares for flows through a two-level weighted fair queuing algorithm. The proposed design is able to equalize the end-to-end bandwidth allocation to competing flows that share common bottlenecks, while fully utilizing the network capacity. Results of simulations are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution in enhancing end-to-end fairness.