Adaptive Optimal Capacity Perception and Control for Wireless Multi-Hop Networks

In wireless multimedia communications, it is extremely difficult to derive general end-to-end capacity results because of decentralized packet scheduling and the interference between communicating nodes. In this paper, we present a statebased channel capacity perception scheme to provide statistical Quality-of-Service (QoS) guarantees under a medium or high traffic load for IEEE 802.11 wireless multi-hop networks. The proposed scheme first perceives the state of the wireless link from the MAC retransmission information and extends this information to calculate the wireless channel capacity, particularly under a saturated traffic load, on the basis of the interference among flows and the link state in the wireless multi-hop networks. Finally, the adaptive optimal control algorithm allocates a network resource and forwards the data packet by taking into consideration the channel capacity deployments in multi-terminal or multi-hop mesh networks. Extensive computer simulations demonstrate that the proposed scheme can achieve better performance in terms of packet delivery ratio and network throughput compared to the existing capacity prediction schemes.