BREW: A bandwidth reservation protocol for multirate anypath routing in wireless mesh networks

In wireless mesh networks (WMNs), more and more applications, especially Video-on-Demand (VoD) services, appear to have strict requirements on guaranteed bandwidth. Most of the existing bandwidth reservation protocols for WMNs follow the approaches from wired networks, and cannot well adapt to the characteristics of wireless communication media, such as lossy and dynamic quality of wireless links. In this paper, we present the first of and width Reservation protocol for multirate anypath routing in WMNs, namely BREW. BREW aggregates bandwidths from multiple anypath routes to improve the flow acceptance ratio and the system-wide throughput, and can be integrated with most of the existing opportunistic routing (OR) protocols, especially the most efficient multirate anypath routing protocols. Furthermore, we extensively evaluate the performance of BREW. Our numerical results show that BREW outperforms the closely related work BORlAC, in terms of flow acceptance ratio and system-wide throughput.