Scheduling-Based Reservation MAC Protocol for Bandwidth and Delay Optimization in Wireless Mesh Networks

Bandwidth reservation in wireless networks is a very challenging task due to the instability of radio channels, node mobility and lack of coordination between nodes. Reservation MAC protocols define a super-frame and allocate as lot to each real-time traffic source. However, the use of fixed length super-frame may result in bandwidth wasting, especially when heterogeneous classes of traffic with different delay and bandwidth requirements are present. Traffic sources may not use their reserved slot in each super-frame to transmit data packets. In addition, based on the size of its generated packets, a traffic source may use only a part of its reserved slot. In this paper, we propose a flexible reservation MAC protocol which reserves bandwidth to traffic sources based on their individual bandwidth and delay requirements. Different nodes may share the same slot, thus our protocol avoids bandwidth wasting in the presence of multimedia applications with different QoS requirements. Simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of our protocol.