A link layer adaptive pacing scheme for improving performance of wireless mesh networks

In this paper, we propose an adaptive pacing scheme at the Link layer for IEEE 802.11 based multihop wireless networks. Our objective is to improve the performance of higher layer protocols without any modifications to them. Our adaptive pacing scheme estimates the four-hop transmission delay in the network path without incurring any additional overheads, and accordingly paces the packets to reduce the contention in the network. We implemented the Link layer adaptive pacing scheme in ns-2.29 network simulator and extensively studied its performance for both User Datagram Protocol (UDP) and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) traffic in different network scenarios. In all the cases our scheme shows a significant improvement in the performance of both UDP and TCP.