Implementing wireless network performance optimization for Small and Medium Enterprises

There is a high growth rate in number of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in South Africa and the role they play in the growth of South African economy is very vital. These organizations set up networks to ease communication and share resources. However, due to rapid growth in most of the SMEs, they face network performance limitations including high link congestion, intermediate node loss, high end-to-end delay and poor Quality of Service (QoS). These limitations lead to poor network performance, because a more reliable path is not selected before packet transmission starts and the available bandwidth is properly allocated between communicating users. In this paper, we designed and implemented an enhanced bandwidth sharing scheme by integrating cooperative game theory, multiple routing metrics and standard-Dijkstra algorithm, in order to reduce link congestion, end-to-end delay and minimize number of packets lost during transmission. The enhanced bandwidth sharing scheme first select a more reliable path then allocate the available bandwidth between communicating users based on the packet size they want to send at a particular time. The Network Simulator 2 (NS2) simulation results showed that the enhanced bandwidth sharing scheme produced the desired QoS and there is high bandwidth utilization. It also reduced link congestion, end-to-end delay and minimized number of packets lost at various packet sizes.