A Contention-Based Hop-By-Hop Bidirectional Congestion Control Algorithm for Ad-Hoc Networks

Existing hop-by-hop congestion control algorithms are mainly divided into two categories: those improving the sending rate and those suppressing the receiving rate. However, these congestion control algorithms have problems with validity and limitations. It is likely that the network will be paralyzed due to the unreasonable method of mitigating congestion. In this paper, we present a contention-based hop-by-hop bidirectional congestion control algorithm (HBCC). This algorithm uses the congestion detection method with queue length as a parameter. By detecting the queue length of the current node and the next hop node, the congestion conditions can be divided into the following four categories: 0–0, 0–1, 1–0, 1–1 (0 means no congestion, 1 means congestion). When at least one of the two nodes is congested, the HBCC algorithm adaptively adjusts the contention window of the current node, which can change the priority of the current node to access the channel. In this way, the buffer queue length of the congested node is reduced. When the congestion condition is 1–1, the hop-by-hop priority congestion control (HPCC) method proposed in this paper is used. This algorithm adaptively changes the adjustment degree of the current node competition window and improves the priority of congestion processing of the next hop node. The NS2 simulation shows that by using the HBCC algorithm, when compared with distributed coordination function (DCF) without congestion control, the proposed unidirectional congestion control algorithms hop-by-hop receiving-based congestion control (HRCC) and hop-by-hop sending-based congestion control (HSCC), and the existing congestion control algorithm congestion alleviation—MAC (CA-MAC), the average saturation throughput increased by approximately 90%, 62%, 12%, and 62%, respectively, and the buffer overflow loss ratio reduced by approximately 80%, 79%, 44%, and 79%.