A new method for congestion avoidance in wireless mesh networks

Abstract

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) will play an important role in next-generation wireless communications involving wireless networks. The traffic in this network (WMN) often saturates on certain paths, causing congestion problems to occur. Currently, many proposed protocols have been created based on Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) to contribute towards solving this particular problem. Unfortunately, most of these methods disregard the congestion problem after an optimal path is found. In this paper, a New Congestion Avoidance Method (NCAM) is proposed. NCAM is designed to improve load balancing by solving congestion problems after the optimal path is found. There are three mechanisms proposed in NCAM: detection of congestion in each optimal node to prepare a suboptimal path, updating of suboptimal pheromone value, and transferring data packets to the suboptimal path. We implemented our method in Network Simulator Version 2 and measured its effective performance compared to a family of existing ACO approaches in terms of packet throughput, end-to-end delay, and packet loss. The result demonstrates that NCAM provided better throughput, decreased end-to-end delay, and less packet loss compared to AntNet and CACO.