WIRS: Resource reservation and traffic regulation for QoS support in wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are expected to be a next step toward future generation of wireless networks due to their rapidly deployable nature and to the wide variety of their potential use. On the other hand, the daily increase of multimedia applications over wireless networks has generated a vital need to provide Quality of Service (QoS) support in WMNs, and works in this area are not sufficient for the moment. In this paper, we propose a QoS model, named WiRS, to support real time traffic over WMNs. WiRS consists of an admission control and two traffic regulation schemes. The admission control is based on a temporary reservation process allowing multiple flows to opportunistically benefit from reserved resources when they are not used by their correspondent flow. The traffic regulation schemes aim to dynamically adjust the injected traffic into the mesh backbone in order to avoid the congestion and to maintain the QoS requirements. A service differentiation mechanism is provided also through one of the regulation schemes in order to control the best effort traffic. Extensive simulations show that our proposal is able to provide stable end-to-end delay, high throughput and improved packet delivery ratio.