Starvation Mitigation Through Multi-Channel Coordination in CSMA Multi-hop Wireless Networks

Starvation Mitigation Through Multi-Channel Coordination in CSMA Multi-hop Wireless Networks, Jingpu Shi, Theodoros Salonidis, Edward Knightly, in Proc. of MobiHoc'06, May 22-27, Florence, Italy.

This paper follows up on the Infocom paper of the same team (replace the first author with M. Garetto) which identified some starvation conditions based on the mesh topology in networks using a CSMA/CA scheme. Basically (I don't think I wrote up that Infocom paper here, did I?) the 802.11 protocol fail in some scenarios based on the asymmetric distribution of protocol messages. For instance, if A initiates a communication with a and B with b, and if B is in range of a, but not A, then B hears the protocol messages of the A-a pair (at least a's CTS) while A hears nothing of the messages from the B-b pair. This of course advantages B.

This paper suggests a multi-channel protocol with a simple contending control channel and data transmission are allocated on the other channels based on the information available at the node trying to initiate a connection. Only the channels for which the node knows the transmission information are being considered for transmission, the other (unknown) channels are unavailable. The node can thus contend fairly to these channels it has information about, since it knows when they become available.

This is not dissimilar to some multi-channel proposal I saw where nodes announce they have freed the channel when they come back to the control channel. The trade-off: more messages on the control channel in one case (more collisions thus) vs. better knowledge of the NAV for each channel, ie. more channels to use for transmissions. I guess the parameter that control the trade-off would be the amount of data transferred per channel negotiation. The larger the data, the more one benefits knowing which channels are available and the fewer messages on the control channel.

This paper here is quite simple and elegant, however, since it only requires the sam number of messages as those defined in the 802.11s multi-channel mode I believe.