Broadcast Scheduling for Wireless Mesh Networks Based on Transmission Demand

The performance of a time division multiple access (TDMA) based wireless mesh network (WMN) depends highly on the broadcast scheduling algorithm (BSA) applied. In this paper, it is demonstrated that the required throughput of a node is based on the amount of packets generated at that node and also the packets that need to be relayed through the node. Therefore, depending on the node´s position within the WMN, nodes will have different throughput requirements. In order to quantify the required throughput of a node, the metric transmission demand (TD) is defined and a TD based BSA is proposed. Second, a TD based channel utilization metric named transmission efficiency is introduced and a modified way to use the Pollaczek-Khintchine (P-K) formula is also proposed to include the influence of TD in average delay computations. Results demonstrate that the proposed BSA is scalable and provides higher throughput and less average delay compared to other BSAs.