Per node throughput fairness in a single branch of a mesh network

Abstract

It is important to provide throughput fairness in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) so that each node has a fair chance at sending its packets through the network. Existing protocols for WMN’s do not provide throughput fairness for nodes that are more than one hop away from the gateway. In some cases, nodes that are further than one hop away from the gateway experience throughput starvation especially is this the case when the network load is increased [5], [7]. The purpose of this thesis is to simulate a new Mesh Fairness Algorithm (MFA) for a single branch of a mesh network and show that the MFA gives a much greater fairness as far as throughput for each node. In this MFA, the packet queue will be modified and the backoff counter in each node will be changed based on the actions and locations of other nodes in the network which will result in greater throughput fairness