Distributed resource reservation in hybrid MAC with admission control for wireless mesh networks

Abstract

Providing guaranteed quality of service (QoS) for multimedia applications is a challenging topic in wireless mesh networks (WMNs). This paper proposes a distributed resource reservation (RR) mechanism with novel admission control to guarantee QoS performance of real-time sessions (RTSNs) while improving bandwidth utilization in WMNs. The proposed RR mechanism establishes logical clusters (LCs) for identifying interference relationships between nodes and avoids simultaneous transmissions from interfering nodes. Following the established LCs, a cooperative contention and collision-free channel access is achieved in hybrid medium access control (MAC) for multihop data forwarding in WMNs. To efficiently utilize the scarce resources in a contention-free period, soft and hard resources are reserved for RTSNs according to their QoS demands. This is achieved by a novel admission control algorithm. Furthermore, an analytical model is derived for investigating the RR parameters of the proposed mechanism. Simulation results show that the proposed mechanism guarantees the QoS for RTSNs while improving bandwidth utilization.