Joint routing and flow rate optimization in multi-rate ad hoc networks

Typical radios in ad hoc networks can support multi-rate transmissions. However, traditional routing protocols do not use this feature well in multi-rate ad hoc networks and therefore, the network performance and resource utilization are not optimized. Some algorithms have been proposed to take advantage of the multi-rate transmission scheme, but their performance is not optimized either. In this paper, we show that a cross-layer optimization based approach can significantly improve the performance of multi-rate ad hoc networks over existing routing algorithms. For this, we consider link interference and propose joint routing and flow rate optimization for optimal performance in multi-rate ad hoc networks, i.e., a Cross-layer Optimization based Model for Multi-rate Ad hoc Networks (COMMAN). Considering the characteristics of multi-rate ad hoc networks, we design and implement a distributed heuristic of this centralized model. It is shown that the distributed heuristic algorithm can approximate the performance of COMMAN closely.