Guaranteeing throughput for real-time traffic in multi-hop IEEE 802.11 wireless networks

This paper presents a centralized rate assignment scheme for mufti-hop flows in a static IEEE 802.11 wireless network. The rate assignment scheme takes into account not only which flows contend with each other but also how they contend. A centralized arbiter obtains this information, as well as flow requirements, and attempts to maximize aggregate utility under the channel capacity constraints. Centralized resource provisioning eliminates the overhead involved with distributed decision-making and synchronized state-maintenance. Our results show that we are able to control contention, guarantee throughput, and minimize delay, while incurring low overhead.