Determining intra-flow contention along multihop paths in wireless networks

Admission control of flows is essential for providing quality of service in multihop wireless networks. In order to make an admission decision for a new flow, the expected bandwidth consumption of the flow must be correctly determined. Due to the shared nature of the wireless medium, nodes along a multihop path contend among themselves for access to the medium. This leads to intra-flow contention; contention between packets of the same flow being forwarded at different hops along a multihop path causing the actual bandwidth consumption of the flow to become a multiple of its single hop bandwidth requirement. Determining the amount of intra-flow contention is non-trivial since interfering nodes may not be able to communicate directly if they are outside each other's transmission range. In this paper, we propose two methods to determine the extent of intra-flow contention along multihop paths. The highlight of the proposed solutions is that carrier-sensing data is used to deduce information about carrier-sensing neighbors, and no high power transmissions are necessary. Analytical and simulation results show that our methods estimate intra-flow contention with low error, while significantly reducing overhead, energy consumption and latency as compared to previous approaches.