On the support of multimedia applications over IEEE 802.11-based wireless mesh networks

The extended radio coverage provided by wireless mesh networking (WMN) technologies represents a key advantage compared to the last mile solutions based on standard IEEE 802.11 hot spots. Nevertheless, modern requirements to wireless connectivity include mandatory QoS guarantees for a wide set of real-time applications. In this paper, we first propose a methodology for evaluating multimedia applications over real world WMN deployments and then we report the results of an extensive measurement campaign performed exploiting IEEE 802.11-based WMN testbed. Later, we evaluate the QoS performance of the reference multimedia applications exploiting three different link scheduling disciplines. Results show that, using opportunistic scheduling techniques capable of providing performance isolation among competing flows can significantly improve system capacity.