Ant-inspired level-based congestion control for wireless mesh networks

The ever increasing presence of services over wireless networks utilizing large bandwidth necessitates the constant quest for developing efficient and dependable services, capable of providing support to a wide and variety of applications. Wireless mesh networks can provide such reliable and scalable solutions addressing the requirements of the services utilizing large bandwidth. The current focus is on the interesting and challenging issue of channel access for different services with assured bandwidth guarantees. The problem of bandwidth, constantly encountered by the wireless mesh networks, is studied in this paper with due thrust on the issues pertaining to congestion control mechanisms. A novel ant colony-based approach called ant-inspired level-based congestion control (AILCC) is developed in order to effectively manage the issues of bandwidth. The versatility of the AILCC includes its capacity for service differentiation in addressing a range of requests, such as applications of real-time and nonreal-time. The primary focus of AILCC is on providing an efficient congestion control mechanism that can meet numerous bandwidth demands of various applications. The performance of AILCC in terms of the ratio of packet delivery and end-to-end delay is evaluated through relevant simulations. The results obtained demonstrate greater levels of performance of AILCC over the other methods in existence. Copyright (c) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.