Service Differentiation in Ad Hoc Networks by a Modified Backoff Algorithm
Seoung-Seok Kang, Jin Kim · 2004
Many portable devices are coming to be commercially successful and provide useful services to mobile users. Mobile devices may request a variety of data types, including text and multimedia data, thanks to the rich content of the Internet. Different types of data and/or different classes of users may need to be treated with different qualities of service. The implementation of service differentiation in wireless networks is very difficult because of device mobility and wireless channel contention when the backoff algorithm is used to resolve contention. Modification of the t)mary exponential backoff algorithm is one possibility to allow the design of several classes of data traffic flows. We present a study of modifications to the backoff algorithm to support three classes of flows: sold, silver, and bronze. For example, the gold c]ass flows are the highest priority and should satisfy their required target bandwidth, whereas the silver class flows should receive reasonably high bandwidth compared to the bronze class flows. The mixture of the two different transport protocols, UDP and TCP, in ad hoc networks raises significant challenges when defining backoff algorithm modifications. Due to the different characteristics of UDP and TCP, different backoff algorithm modifications are applied to each class of packets from the two transport protocols. Nevertheless, we show by means of simulation that our approach of backoff algorithm modification clearly differentiates service between different flows of classes regardless of the type of transport protocol.