Distributed Resource Reservation in Hybrid MAC with Admission Control for Wireless Mesh Networks

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