Distributed Bottleneck Flow Control in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Flow control in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) encounters more challenges than flow control in conventional wired networks, such as channel bandwidth variation, medium contention, and frequent re-routing. Without proper flow control, serious network performance degradation in MANETs has been reported in recent studies. In this paper, we introduce a distributed bottleneck flow control technique in MANETs. The proposed scheme uses a distributed flow control mechanism that has been used in both bottleneck flow control and bandwidth balancing in Distributed-Queue-Dual-Bus (DQDB) in wired networks. It extends bandwidth balancing to operate in a mobile wireless environment. Extensive simulations demonstrate that our flow control scheme is effective and can provide max-min fairness as well as Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees for flows in MANETs.