Lifetime-Aware Backpressure—A New Delay-Enhanced Backpressure-Based Routing Protocol

Dynamic backpressure is a highly desirable family of routing protocols known for their attractive mathematical properties. However, these protocols suffer from a high end-to-end delay making them inefficient for real-time traffic with strict end-to-end delay requirements. In this paper, we address this issue by proposing a new adjustable and fully distributed backpressure-based scheme with low queue management complexity, named Lifetime-Aware Backpressure (LTA-BP). The novelty in the proposed scheme consists in introducing the urgency level as a new metric for service differentiation among the competing traffic flows in the network. Our scheme not just significantly improves the quality of service provided for real-time traffic with stringent end-to-end delay constraints, but interestingly protects also the flows with softer delay requirements from being totally starved. The proposed scheme has been evaluated and compared against other state-of-the-art routing protocol, using computer simulation, and the obtained results show its superiority in terms of the achieved end-to-end delay and throughput.