End-to-end bandwidth guarantees through fair local spectrum share in wireless ad-hoc networks

Sharing the locally common spectrum among the links of the same vicinity is a fundamental problem in wireless ad-hoc networks. Lately some scheduling approaches have been proposed that guarantee fair share of the bandwidth among the links. What really affects the quality of service perceived by the applications though, is the effective end-to-end bandwidth allocated to the different network sessions that span several links. We propose an algorithm that provides fair session rates in that context. The algorithm is based on a combination of a link scheduling method to avoid local conflicts, a fair session service discipline per link and a hop-by-hop window flow control scheme. It can be shown that the long term rates allocated to the different sessions are maxmin fair. All the stages of the algorithm are implementable based on local information only, except the link scheduling part that needs some network-wide coordination. Some numerical study is performed to evaluate the impact of various parameter choices on the performance of the algorithm.