Rate Control and Dynamic Dimensioning of Multihop Wireless Networks

This paper is concerned with the problem of allocation of data transfer rates to the elastic applications in a multihop wireless network. While this is a well understood problem in wired networks, wireless networks present substantially different dimension to it. For one the very concept of link capacity, though obvious for wired links, is not so for wireless links in a network. Moreover, unlike a wired network, the traffic capacity of a wireless network can be varied simply by modifying certain protocol parameters; thus it is possible to dimension the network dynamically. The wireless networks we consider are so-called infrastructure-based networks implying that they are deployed by service providers by creating hot-spots through access points whereas the end applications running on user devices act as the end users. This permits the network and the users to be seen as separate economic entities competing and collaborating in response to each other. The aim of this paper is to precisely understand these issues and address the appropriate formulations based on them.