SBWAN: Service Differentiation in Broadband Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Wireless ad hoc networks are cost-effective broadband solutions compared to wired broadband technologies like cable and digital subscriber line. In an ad hoc network where each node has to transmit its own traffic and also relay traffic from its neighboring nodes, fair allocation of bandwidth between originating and relayed traffic is a critical issue. Also, since Internet comprises of both real-time and best effort traffic, further resolution is required in bandwidth allocation based on the traffic type. In this paper we propose Service differentiation in Broadband Wireless Ad hoc Networks (SBWAN), which uses distributed control algorithms for (1) Transport layer rate control for best effort TCP traffic and admission control for real-time UDP traffic (2) Fair queuing scheme at the network layer to schedule originating and relayed traffic based on average hop count estimation and traffic type. We have evaluated the proposed approach using ns2 simulator, which shows significant improvement in throughput, delay for real time UDP and fairness to best effort TCP traffic.