A Distributed Scheduling Algorithm with QoS Provisions in Multi-hop Wireless Mesh Networks

Multihop wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are considered a promising technology to backhaul heterogeneous data traffic from wireless access networks to the wired Internet. WMNs are expected to support various types of applications with diverse quality of service (QoS) requirements, such as end-to-end packet delay, throughput, and packet-error-rate (PER). Recent works in this area are mainly concentrated on network layer routing algorithms with QoS provisioning that unfortunately cannot cooperate efficiently with existing medium access control (MAC) solutions to strictly guarantee multiple QoS constraints. This drawback may significantly deteriorate the and-to-end network performance and end-user experience especially for delay/throughput-sensitive applications such as voice-over IP (voIP) and interactive video. In this paper, we propose a fully distributed multi-constrained QoS scheduling algorithm to overcome this disadvantage. We show by simulation that the proposed scheduling scheme can efficiently organize the resources in physical (PHY) and MAC layers to successfully increase the network goodput, decrease the end-to-end (ETE) packet delay, and achieve less QoS outage probability if compared with other protocols.