Abstract
Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are gaining popularity due to the features provided, especially the low cost and self-configuration ability. In WMNs, the data traffic is transmitted through intermediate nodes and a number of packets are dropped during the transmission due to various reasons. One significant reason is the limitation of network resources such as bandwidth and buffer size. Because of these limitations, the network becomes congested under high traffic volumes. Therefore, a large number of packets will be dropped due to buffer overflow in the Interface Queue (IFQ). Hence, controlling the congestion at the IFQ is essential for achieving high throughput. In this paper, we address the node congestion level in multi-channel WMNs and reduce the dropped packets at IFQ by adjusting the traffic rate based on the solution of a linear program (LP). The benefits of these traffic rate adjustments are demonstrated in chain networks using the Network Simulator (NS2). In addition, for complex networks we show that such traffic rate adjustments alone are not sufficient and propose a simple forwarding delay scheme for the Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector protocol with Forwarding delay (AODV-F) that reduces node congestion and improves throughput, which is again demonstrated in simulations with NS2.