Congestion Control Framework for Ad-Hoc Wireless Networks

During the last few years, bandwidth and traffic control have immerged as issues of great importance in ad-hoc wireless networks, requiring sophisticated managing techniques. Moreover, due to the increasing variety of applications and consequently respective need for bandwidth control, such issues are expected to become even more critical in the near future. Main characteristics of MANETs such as multi-hop communication and supporting dynamically varying topologies rapidly and unpredictably change or remain static over long periods of time augments the complexity of the problem as well as the need to efficiently handle it. In order to circumvent those problems, many researchers turn their attention to cross-layer design which provides the possibility to create lightweight and flexible substrate for the demanding ad-hoc wireless networks. This design approach provides critical features that suit the characteristics of ad-hoc wireless networks. This paper proposes a novel, lightweight and efficient cross-layer architecture for congestion control at wireless ad-hoc networks. The performance of this framework is evaluated considering characteristic ad-hoc routing protocols, such as AODV and DSR, in static as well as mobile network topologies using the well known network simulator NS2.