Adaptive Flow Rate Control for Network Utility Maximization Subject to QoS Constraints in Wireless Multi-hop Networks

In this paper, we study the problem of network utility maximization subject to QoS constraints in a wireless multi-hop network. Recently, virtual queues based cross-layer solution has been proposed to address this issue. Virtual queues can share the burden of the actual queues and also control the lengths of actual queues to ensure certain QoS constraints. In this paper, we introduce link reliability into the virtual queue models and optimization objective and accordingly present a fully distributed adaptive CSMA based flow rate control algorithm (AFCA) to achieve network utility maximization subject to QoS constraints. We analyze AFCA's stability property and its near-optimality in network utility maximization while satisfying given QoS constraints. We reveal the relationship between various key parameters in AFCA and resulting network utility. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of our analytical results.