In the following description, it will be considered that:                the “output rate” of a link is equivalent to the “throughput” of this link,        the “maximum output rate” of a link is equivalent to the “maximum throughput” or to the “capacity” of this link,        “transmit in backlogged mode” is equivalent to “transmit at a maximum input rate”.        
As it is known by the man skilled in the art, some of the above mentioned networks, deployed in urban and rural areas around the globe, and notably 802.11 multi-hop wireless mesh networks, enable low cost Internet access and emerging community applications.
Random access networks offer advantages such as simple decentralized Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols that arbitrate transmissions to the wireless medium. However, they are also limited by well-known performance problems such as lack of predictability, unfairness or even complete starvation. These problems are due to the poor synergy of the random access MAC protocol (and notably the IEEE 802.11 one) and higher layers of the protocol stack. Several solutions have been proposed but most require modifications of the MAC protocol or higher layer legacy protocols like TCP.
These solutions may be classified into three categories: throughput prediction solutions, capacity estimation solutions and protocol solutions. One focuses hereafter on the IEEE 802.11 solutions, but as mentioned above the invention is not limited to this type of network.
Several models have been proposed for throughput prediction in 802.11 random access multi-hop networks. Most of them are based on a first solution described in the document of G. Bianchi, “Performance analysis of the IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function”, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 18(3):535-547, March 2000, which captures the effect of IEEE 802.11 binary exponential backoff in single-hop networks, and on a second solution described in the document of R. Boorstyn et al., “Throughput Analysis in Multi-hop CSMA Packet Radio Networks”, IEEE Transactions on Communications, 35(3):267-274, March 1987, which captures the effect of carrier sensing in multi-hop networks.
These models vary in the accuracy with which they model interference (either based purely on geometry or seeded with actual measurements), and their prediction power (single-hop throughput prediction or multi-hop throughput prediction). These models are impractical for operational multi-hop 802.11 networks for two reasons. First, many of these models do not provide closed form expressions for throughput, and therefore one must exhaustively search through the feasible rates region they defined to predict an optimal multi-hop throughput. This search can become prohibitively expensive as the number of flows increases, except if feasibility is characterized by means of non-linear constraints at the potential cost of reduced accuracy. Second, all existing measurement-based models require a separate measurement phase where all links are activated backlogged in specific patterns (individual node activations or pair-wise link activations). As a result, they require either O(N2) measurements or O(L2) measurements, and each measurement typically requires several seconds to collect sufficient statistics. In practice, this imposes an extended mesh network downtime and complicates the network operations with additional signalling mechanisms to switch between measurement and regular operation.
It has been recently proposed, in the document of N. Ahmed et al., “Online Estimation of RF Interference”, Proc. ACM CoNEXT, Madrid, Spain, December 2008, a new technique allowing to significantly reduce the time of these measurements in client-AP WLANs, but this new technique is not applicable to multi-hop wireless mesh networks and requires extensive firmware modifications.