Implicit hop-by-hop congestion control in wireless multihop networks

It has been shown that TCP and TCP-like congestion control are highly problematic in wireless multihop networks. In this paper we present a novel hop-by-hop congestion control protocol that has been tailored to the specific properties of the shared medium. In the proposed scheme, backpressure towards the source node is established implicitly, by passively observing the medium. A lightweight error detection and correction mechanism guarantees a fast reaction to changing medium conditions and low overhead. Our approach is equally applicable to TCP- and UDP-like data streams. We demonstrate the performance of our approach by an in-depth simulation study. These findings are underlined by testbed results obtained using an implementation of our protocol on real hardware. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.