On the Potential of IEEE 802.11s Intra-Mesh Congestion Control

摘要

IEEE 802.1 Is is an emerging IEEE 802.11 amendment, aiming at standardizing wireless mesh networking. As congestion is a major problem in wireless mesh networks, IEEE 802.11s addresses this problem by introducing the intra-mesh congestion control. In order to explore the potential of this mechanism, we describe two different IEEE 802.11s compliant congestion control mechanisms and discuss their respective benefits and limitations. Results from a simulative evaluation demonstrate that intra-mesh congestion control is suitable for avoiding the loss of packets which have already been forwarded over the air interface and, if appropriately implemented, increases the overall network throughput. The results do however also point out the limitations of the proposed IEEE 802.11 s congestion notification format.