Optimal Congestion Control Algorithm for Ad hoc Networks

Based on the characteristics of the contention relationship between flows in Ad hoc networks, the notion of the link's interference set is introduced in this paper, and then a price framework based on the link's interference set is built. In such a price framework, the aggregated price over the link interference set is interpreted as the congestion information about this link. Correspondingly, a distributed algorithm, Price Coordination Approach (PCA), is presented to solve the congestion control problem for small time interval; and adaptation of PCA for the uncertain changes of network scenarios is analyzed. Simulation results show that PCA can quickly converge to globally optimal solutions. Compared with the Additional Increase Multiplicative Decrease (AIMD) algorithm in TCP-Reno, PCA is more adaptive to time-varying network situations and achieves better network performance.