Probabilistic packet dropping for load control in multihop wireless networks

In multihop wireless networks, packets of a traffic flow originating from a source node are relayed by intermediate nodes (relay nodes) and travel toward their destination node along a multihop wireless path. If a source node transmits excessive packets at a high rate, its relay node may not have enough channel access opportunities to forward them, resulting in a significant throughput decrease on an end-to-end perspective of multihop path. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic packet dropping scheme that regulates the traffic load offered by source nodes and reduces their interference with neighboring relay nodes on the multihop paths. Through ns-2 simulations, we show that the proposed scheme can significantly improve the end-to-end throughput performance without exploiting topological information under chain and cross topologies.