A Pragmatic Approach for QoS in Wireless Mesh Networks

In this paper we present a QoS routing protocol for IEEE-802.11 based mesh networks. The main challenge for providing QoS in terms of bandwidth and latency is that the medium is shared between all nodes in close range, which complicates reservation of medium time. Furthermore, the use of standard compliant hardware components requires an integration of the existing medium access mechanism, which is designed for besteffort communication only. A cluster-based structure is used for representing the local domains of the shared medium and allowing reservation of medium time. On top of this reservation an optimistic reactive algorithm is used for discovery and reservation of routes that fulfil the application specified QoS requirements. Simulation results are presented that prove the correctness of this approach.