The effect of payload length on QoS in IEEE 802.11s Wireless Mesh Networks

In recent years Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) have gained lot of attention from service providers and industry due to low cost and instant deployment at both access and distribution level. The IEEE 802.11s standard addresses the need for such networks. In multi-hop networks, throughput decreases exponentially with the increase in number of hops. Thus providing QoS in multi-hop networks becomes a delicate process. The use of larger payloads can significantly enhance throughput and channel utilization. However, using larger payloads has some coupled tradeoffs. The selection of optimal payload length varies with the type of the data in the frame and flow requirements. This paper describes these tradeoffs and presents the effect of payload length on various QoS measures like throughput, jitter, packet loss ratio and end-to-end delay for different type of traffic classes and access categories.