Effect of Traffic Arrival Distributions on Routing Strategyin Multi-Hop Wireless Networks

Abstract

The basic problem of whether direct transmission or multihop routing increases goodput in multi-hop wireless networks still lacks investigation from many aspects. This article, approaches this problem by considering the effect of different traffic arrival distributions on the choice of routing strategy for enhancing goodput of IEEE 802.11 DCF based multi-hop wireless networks under hidden terminal existence. Different traffic arrival distributions; including Poisson, constant bit rate (CBR), Pareto and Exponential are considered, relaxing the generally adopted Poisson assumption, for various data rates over a wide range of traffic loads extending from unsaturated to saturated traffic loads.The goodput performance for all traffic arrival distributions is found to be dependent on the traffic load in multihop networks. Of the four traffic models used, the network achieved the best goodput with Pareto and Exponential arrival distributions for light traffic loads, where CBR performs slightly better under heavy loads. The results suggest that a traffic load-aware pre-control mechanism on the traffic arrivals to the IEEE 802.11 MAC layer might provide significant goodput gains in multi-hop wireless networks.