In proceedings of the 2011 International Symposium on Multimedia and Communication Technology

Congestion-free Routes for Wireless Mesh Networks

Nemesio A. Macabale Jr.*, Roel M. Ocampo, and Cedric Angelo M. Festin * Central Luzon State University, Philippines University of the Philippines, Philippines E-mail:{namacabale, roel, cmfestin}@up.edu.ph Abstract Recently proposed wireless mesh routing metrics based on awareness of congestion, load or interference typically employ queue occupancy of a node's wireless interface to estimate traffic load. Queue occupancy, however, does not directly reflect the impact of channel contention from neighbor nodes. We propose an alternative called the channel load-aware (CLAW) routing metric that takes into consideration not only the traffic load within the node itself, but also the degree of interference and contention within the channel. CLAW uses local information from a node's MAC layer to estimate channel busyness and contention levels. It does not require complex computations, nor the exchange of link-level statistics with neighbors. Our preliminary results show that CLAW can identify congested regions within the network and thus enable the determination of routes around these congested areas. We present the results of simulations we conducted to evaluate the use of CLAW in mesh-wide routing. Keywords - wireless mesh networks, routing, routing metric, congestion awareness. neighbors. Consequently, we found out that the information provided by the MAC layer of a wireless node would be sufficient to achieve our goals. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section II elaborates further on the motivation for this work, and discusses similar work found in the literature. Section III presents an analysis that leads to CLAW's design and implementation, while Section IV discusses the results of the preliminary evaluation. Finally, Section V concludes by enumerating the contribution of this work.

II.

RELATED WORK

I.

INTRODUCTION

Wireless mesh networks (WMN) have attracted significant attention in recent years for flexible and rapid deployment of wireless services in a wide variety of applications. These applications include broadband home networking and automation [1], [2], community mesh networking [3-5], in transportation systems [6], public safety and disaster scenarios [7], [8], and in medical applications [9]. Mesh networks are composed of wireless nodes that participate either as routers or clients of the network. The mesh routers are generally static or minimally mobile and serve either as dedicated forwarding nodes, access points for clients like desktop PCs, laptops and mobile devices, or both. Collectively, mesh routers form the backbone of the wireless network, enabling traffic to be transported and ensuring reachability between participating nodes. However, despite advances in the field, there are still many interesting research challenges in optimally routing traffic within a wireless mesh network. Due to the shared nature of the wireless channel, routing based on metrics traditionally used in wired networks such as hop counts do not take into account interference and contention within the channel shared among neighboring mesh nodes. As a result, routing algorithms that use such "congestionagnostic" metrics may tend to direct multiple traffic flows naively along known best paths, eventually congesting wireless channels along the path and causing significant drops in network throughput. In contrast, a routing algorithm that is able to veer the traffic flow towards calmer regions of the network would be less likely to suffer from such a scenario. To address this issue, we propose a routing metric called the channel-load aware routing metric (CLAW) designed to take into account congestion, interference and load-imbalance issues found in wireless mesh networks. Our design goal is to come up with a simple yet accurate congestion / interference / load-aware routing metric that can be incorporated into a more general concept of capacity awareness [10]. To accomplish this task, in CLAW's design, we avoided the need to advertise and collect link-level statistics between

In a multi-hop WMN, routing is more critical than in wired networks, because the wireless medium is shared and is highly dynamic [11]. Different packet flows may interfere with each other even when they do not necessarily traverse the same path. Along a path, neighboring nodes that share a channel compete for its use forming a collision domain (see Figure 1). As more flows traverse nearby paths and nodes, they compete for access to the shared channel, eventually congesting the path and lowering throughput significantly. There have been several efforts to address this issue through the use of load-aware, interference-aware, and/or congestion-aware routing metric either singly [12-23] or in combination with multiple metrics [24-32]. Load-aware routing algorithms such as DLAR [16] and ALARM [30] measure load based on the number of packets buffered in the interface queue. However, a single node's internal load as gauged from the state of its buffers cannot reliably estimate the level of congestion within a collision domain, because the queues of other nodes within that domain could be empty or lightly loaded. In this case, the heavily- and lightly-loaded nodes do not jointly paint a consistent picture of the channel. In other words, while interface queue occupancy accurately measures load on nodes, it does not necessarily estimate the load on a region in a network. To measure loaded regions, many proposals either obtain the sum [13], [18], [20], [21], [28], [29], [31] or the average of queue length [14], [15], [19], [25] of nodes within a collision domain. This approach requires the data to be collected or exchanged among neighbors, and thus generates additional overhead in terms of bandwidth and route convergence time. Other proposals measure channel load based on radio-frequency (RF) channel interference [18], [23] and delay [33], [34]. However, in most wireless environments there are other potential sources of interference and delay aside the load in the channel, such as physical layer impairments and bad channel conditions [11]. Hence, there should be a way to both measure and differentiate channel and node load. The interference awareness and load-balancing metric in [26], [27] requires probe packets and neighbor-wide gathering of link-state statistics, which likewise generate overhead in the bandwidth and time needed to calculate the metric. Some proposal that truly measure congestion, interference, and load include LWR [12] and C2WB [17]. LWR however combines multiple metrics to achieve its goal, requiring more calculations than CLAW, which relies on a single metric. In addition, LWR collects information from neighbors. Similarly, C2WB requires probing packets, neighbor information, and a complex computation. In addition, it requires a change in the MAC layer protocol,

We proposed CLAW to address the issues mentioned, through the use of node-local information, and by requiring only simple computations. In our investigation, we found that the MAC layer has all the information needed to accurately estimate channel load, interference, and node load. CLAW can be used by routing protocols as an alternative to existing congestion awareness mechanisms either in single channel or multi-channel environments.

Ch _ load=T sensedEnergyT blockedForAccess

(1)

where : T sensedEnergy is that fraction of time that a node is transmittinga packet to thechannel , is receiving a packet from the channel , issensing transmissionenergy beit collision , interference , or noise in thechannel T blockedForAccess isthat fraction of time that anode is backing - off or deferring

III.

DESIGN

AND IMPLEMENTATION

Our analysis begins by looking at a node j's collision domain. It is comprised of all nodes within j's carrier sensing range that operate on the same channel. Transmissions of these nodes may interfere with transmissions from j. This is illustrated in Fig. 1, with the simplifying assumption that the carrier sensing range is circular. The nodes in this diagram are furthermore assumed to operate using the IEEE 802.11b wireless standard. Because of the shared nature of the channel, the load on a node affects all the neighbor nodes that can sense its transmission. That is, an idle node will respond to a new traffic flow request like a busy or loaded node if a neighbor within its carrier sensing range is in fact busy or loaded. Hence, identifying busy regions, rather than busy nodes, is a more effective approach in avoiding congestion, preventing interference, and distributing traffic loads. The routing protocol may then assign a lower cost to the next-hop node that has the least busy collision domain. This is the basic intuition behind, and our motivation for, the development and use of the CLAW metric.

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Node i's collision domain

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Node j's collission domain

Figure 1: A Wireless Mesh Network with 25 nodes

A.

Channel Load

Ch _ load=

From the point of view of a node, the channel is in use, i.e. busy, when the node is either transmitting or receiving a packet from the channel, or if it senses any transmission energy that hinders successful transmission such as those resulting from collisions, interference, or other forms of noise. In addition, the channel may likewise be considered busy when the node is blocked from accessing the channel, such as due to the back-off and defer periods in the distributed coordination function (DCF) in the IEEE 802.11 standard [35]. If all these events can be classified into one of two fractional components of time, called TsensedEnergy and TblockedForAccess, then channel load is the total fraction of time that a node is busy due to any of these contributing events. Equation (1) expresses this definition of channel load. We derived this definition from the result of a simple experiment with three IEEE 802.11b nodes placed within a single collision domain. In the experiment, a node Node0 sent packets to another node Node1 until channel saturation, while a third node Node2 silently observed. Although the physical layer of all three nodes sensed the channel with the same degree of actual utilization (i.e. amount of time packets occupied the channel), the sender Node0 was loaded/busier (see Fig. 2) than the the receiver Node1 and the observer Node2, all the way through saturation, because of the blocking time (back-off and defer periods) in the DCF functionality of IEEE 802.11b[35]. At saturation, although the sender viewed channel load to be 100% the receiver and observer only viewed the channel as around 78% loaded. It is interesting to note that the 78% load approximated the ratio of time the packets propagating in the air occupied the channel. This is comparable to the throughput saturation encountered at around 80% channel busyness by others [36]. Generally, saturation throughputs have not been achieved at 100% busyness [36], [37] as may be intuitively expected from such a metric, because the back-off and defer periods in the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol were not taken into account. In contrast, by taking these into account, the CLAW metric is able to account for the missing ~20% busyness. Thus, not only can CLAW effectively identify busy regions, in addition, it can discriminate between loaded and non-loaded nodes within such busy regions.

busy _ count scan _ count

(2) (3)

CLAW j t =1CLAW j t 1Ch _ load j

where : CLAW j t The value of CLAW at timet isa tunable parameter :0 1,here 0.5is used Ch _ load j isthe current observed channel load at node j CLAW j t1 isthe previous CLAW t refers tothe current measuring period

CLAW P t = CLAW j t
jP

(4)

where : CLAW P t isthe equivalent path metric based on CLAW

1.2 1 0.8
Estimated Channel Load Estimated Packet In the Air Node 0 Ch_load Node 1 Ch_load Node 2 Ch_load

percent of time

0.6 0.4 0.2 0

0 1 2 5 8

input traffic (Mbps) Figure 2: Channel Load Measurement

It is also worth noting that we do not make any assumption about the operating channel of a collision domain. Our analysis only require that i and j's collision domain operate on the same channel. If some collision domains operate over different channels the analysis will follow the same process. In addition, the analysis (TsensedEnergy and TblockedForAccess) will still be valid had a different mac layer technology been used. Thus, CLAW is suitable to single- and multiradio or multi-channel mesh networks.

V.

CONCLUSIONS

B.

Implementation

To estimate the channel load, we simply monitor how the MAC layer views the channel. The MAC layer senses the busyness of the channel through carrier sensing (provided by the physical layer) and virtual carrier sensing through its NAV (network allocation vector) [35]. Within a defined observation period the MAC layer is queried whether it senses the channel to be busy, backing-off, or deferring. The number of times where the MAC layer reports any of these three conditions (busy_count), divided by the number of times the MAC layer is queried (scan_count) becomes the estimated channel load as defined in Eq. (2). It is interesting to note that the channel load computed using Eq. (2) consistently matched the estimated channel load (for Node0) and actual fractional packet-in-the-air time (for Node1 and Node2) as observed and presented in Fig. (2). To account for sudden changes in traffic and the dynamic behavior of the wireless channel, we employ a moving average for the channel load using a tunable parameter . We initially used =0.5, although further experimentation and study may suggest other values. The CLAW metric is thus defined in Eq (3) as the moving average of the estimated channel load. Equation (4) is the equivalent path metric based on CLAW.

We propose the channel-load aware (CLAW) routing metric to address issues in congestion, interference and load-imbalance problem in wireless mesh networks. CLAW does not require complex computations, nor any exchange or collection of neighborwide link-level statistics. Its simplicity allows it to be easily integrated, if necessary, with other capacity-aware routing metrics with minimal overhead. Analysis also shows it is suitable to singleand multi-channel or multi-radio mesh networks. Initial simulation results demonstrated its ability to effectively estimate channel busyness and enable flows to avoid congested regions. Although it shows promise, our initial comparison with hop-count routing merely demonstrates CLAW's basic ability to support congestion-free routing. A more comprehensive performance comparison with similar congestion-aware metrics is therefore in order. Ultimately, the usefulness of this metric can only be fully realized through actual, working implementations, rather than through theoretical simulations. We will hopefully address all of these in our future work.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work has been supported by the Engineering Research and Development for Technology (ERDT) Consortium, Department of Science and Technology Science Education Institute (DOST-SEI), Republic of the Philippines.
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IV. SIMULATION AND DISCUSSION

We performed preliminary qualitative and quantitative experiments to evaluate the performance of our proposed routing metric using ns-2 [38] with the OLSR extension as used in [39]. We wanted to quickly test whether our metric would in fact avoid busy regions of the network, and whether it would achieve better throughput compared to hop count-based routing. The first set of simulations were designed to show whether the CLAW metric could steer flows away from loaded regions of the network. The set-up shown in Fig. 3, similar to that in [36] involved 25 nodes uniformly distributed in a grid of 800 x 800 square meters. Data-rates between nodes is set to 11 Mbps. For the main traffic flow, FTP bulk traffic over TCP was used, with the packet size set of 1040 bytes (NS2 default size [38]). Constant bit rate (CBR) is used for the interference flow. To simplify the simulation both transmission range and sensing range were set to 250m, while the distance between nodes was set to 176 m. At the start of the simulation, the interference flow between nodes 11 and 12 was initiated, creating the busy region indicated by the two circular areas in Fig. 3. With a traditional hop count metric, packets traversed the path 00-06-12-18-24. With CLAW, packets followed the path 0001-02-03-09-14-19-24, effectively avoiding the busy region in the network. In the second set of simulations, the interfering traffic was varied from 0, 0.5 Mbps, 1 Mbps, 1.5 Mbps, , 5 Mbps in order to observe network behavior and performance with varying degrees of busyness. Fig. 4 compares the throughput attained by the main flow with hop count and CLAW routing metrics. Each data point in the graph represents the average from 10 simulation runs. The dramatic decrease in the throughput of the network that used hop count routing, especially around 2-2.5 Mbps interference traffic, was due to packet drops within the busy region. In contrast, CLAW was able to avoid the busy region, resulting in significantly better end-to-end throughput even with high levels of busyness within the network.

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Figure 3: Node 00 originates an FTP flow towards Node 24. CBR traffic between Node 11 and Node 12 form an interference flow. While hop-count based routing would result in the straight-line path 00-06-12-18-24, CLAW routes the flow through 00-01-02-03-09-14-19-24, avoiding busy regions
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400 300 200 100 0 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 4.5 5

Interfering Traffic (Mbps)

Figure 4: Throughput comparison between CLAW and Hopcount metrics

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In proceedings of the 2011 International Symposium on Multimedia and Communication Technology