DRVR
Abstract
Wireless mesh networks hold the promise of rapid and flexible deployments of communication facilities. It’s potential notwithstanding, the often erratic behavior of multihop wireless transmissions is limiting the range of applications that such networks can target. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility and benefits of a routing protocol explicitly aimed at making wireless mesh networks more predictable while preserving their efficiency and flexibility. e protocol’s basic premise is the classical idea that a multipath solution can offer resiliency to unexpected link variations. e paper’’s contributions are in demonstrating how this can be effectively realized in a wireless context, and in offering initial evidence of its efficacy. In particular, the paper illustrates how routing decisions that account for link variability can be computed in a distributed fashion, and the benefits they afford in improving the stability of end-to-end transmission rates even in the presence of random network fluctuations.
Contributions
- Developing and validating an effective distributed optimization solution, which accounts for a number of practical deployment aspects such as convergence and infeasibility detection.
- Assessing the benefits of such an approach compared to solutions that primarily seek to maximize transmission rates. In particular, we showed that while a multipath approach yields a slightly lower long-term guaranteed rate, it substantially reduces rate fluctuations; especially at the time-scale of relevance to real-time, interactive applications
People
Behnaz Arzani
Principal Researcher