Data rate, path length and network contention trade-off in IEEE 802.11s mesh networks: A dynamic data rate selection approach

Most of the commercially available wireless routers are equipped with multi-rate support to adopt physical data rates based on the channel condition fluctuations. The recent studies in multi-rate support have shown that low data rates are more effective when the channel error rate is high. Because of the physical layer modulation and signal decoding issues, low data rates are sustainable for long transmission ranges. Therefore, for multi-hop mesh networks, low data rates may scale down the end-to-end path length towards the destination in terms of number of hops, resulting in less end-to-end forwarding delay. However, for a network with high traffic load, long transmission ranges may increase contention for channel access among the contending neighbors. This paper uses the diffusion approximation method of queuing analysis to study the trade-off among data rate, end-to-end path length and network contention in a multi-rate mesh network built over the IEEE 802.11s specifications. From the observations of the theoretical analysis, a distributed and localized rate adaptation scheme is proposed for IEEE 802.11s mesh networks, by augmenting the standard peer selection, channel access and forwarding protocols. The performance of the proposed rate adaptation protocol is evaluated and compared with existing rate adaptation protocols using simulation results.