Modeling Medium Utilization for Admission Control in Industrial Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are a promising technology for industrial environment communication because of their high flexibility and low cost. To fulfill the thereby arising reliability demands, admission control can be used to prevent congestion and to provide end-to-end guarantees to applications. However, this requires a very precise modeling of the medium utilization for existing and requested data flows, which is challenging due to the dynamics of such networks. In this paper we propose a medium utilization model for small-scale multi-rate WMNs considering the end-to-end throughput. The model is integrated into a feedback control loop to allow an admission control mechanism to ensure reliable end-to-end communication. Our approach increases the available performance without sacrificing reliability. A real test-bed evaluation shows that our admission control manager allows to fully utilize the network capacity while keeping packet losses under 0.5% and three-hop latency below 5.5ms. This is a significant improvement towards reliable multi-rate WMNs, leveraging their applicability in industrial applications with high throughput demands.