Co-existence of Evolutionary Mixed-Bias Scheduling with Quiescence and IEEE 802.11 DCF for Wireless Mesh Networks

The evolutionary programming mixed bias scheduling has been shown to provide significantly reduced end-to-end delay while maintaining comparable packet delivery ratio when evaluated using simulation experiments compared to the current IEEE 802.11 DCF standard. In this paper, proposed is an enhanced MB-EP algorithm which includes a new quiescent state called MB-EP-Q. This new approach is evaluated using network simulation with respect to throughput and delay. The new approach was found to have similar performance to the existing MB-EP approach. Furthermore to demonstrate that the MB-EP-Q approach can co-exist with existing IEEE 802.11 DCF mechanisms another experiment is performed where a portion of the routers are running the MB-EP-Q algorithm while the rest run IEEE 802.11 DCF. The results show an improvement in performance even when a small proportion of the nodes are running the MB-EP-Q algorithm. This result is important since it shows that the MB-EP approaches can be applied to existing deployments gradually and with lower cost than other competing approaches which may require the entire network infrastructure to be modified.