AR-TP: An adaptive and responsive transport protocol for wireless mesh networks

Wireless meshing has been envisioned as the economically viable networking paradigm to build up broadband and large-scale wireless commodity networks. Several different mesh network architectures have been conceived by both industry and academia; however many issues on the deployment of efficient and fair transport protocols are still open. In this paper, an adaptive and responsive transport protocol (ARTP) is proposed for WMNs in order to fairly allocate the network resources among multiple flows, while minimizing the performance overhead. Compared to the classical end-to-end rate control mechanisms, an hop-by-hop congestion control approach is designed to keep track of dynamic multi-hop network characteristics in a responsive manner. In addition, a coarse-grained end-to-end reliability algorithm is integrated with the proposed hop-by-hop congestion control mechanism to provide packet level reliability at the transport layer. Performance evaluation via extensive simulation experiments show that the AR-TP protocol achieves high performance in terms of network throughput and fairness.