Cross-layered Hop-by-Hop Congestion Control for Multihop Wireless Networks

In this paper, we present a novel congestion control algorithm (HRC), which uses hop-by-hop approach and rate-based transmission, for IEEE 802.11 multihop wireless networks. Since medium contention is most dominant cause of packet loss in multihop wireless networks, our algorithm considers the degree of medium contention level experienced at a given node for data rate control at the transport layer. The main purpose of our algorithm is to maximize the network throughput by data rate control while minimizing the packet losses caused by medium contention. The simulation study using GloMoSim shows that our algorithm achieves up to 40% more the network throughput than TCP and TCP-selective acknowledgment (SACK)