On Throughput Guarantee of Aloha-Like Multi-Hop Wireless Networks

Providing Quality of Service (QoS) is one of significant issues for multimedia traffic. One approach to achieve the requested QoS is to characterize the traffic flows and guarantee their committed throughput. In a typical multi-hop wireless ad hoc network, determining the feasibility for a given set of flow characteristics is challenging due to the multi-user interference problem. To that end, this paper presents the following contributions. First, we describe a simple Aloha-like Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol that enables each flow to maintain its requested bandwidth, and thus is suitable for multimedia traffic. Second, we propose a bandwidth feasibility algorithm based on the Variable Elimination (VE) technique. The bandwidth feasibility algorithm determines whether or not a given network can support a set of flows of certain bit rates. Simulations indicate that our solution can precisely control the bit rates over all hosts while providing the throughput guarantees.