Impact of scheduled mesh access on the capacity of wireless mesh links

In this paper we evaluate the performance of a dual-radio 802.11-based mesh network in which each mesh node adheres to a transmission schedule negotiated with peers to avoid interfering with one another when transmitting delay sensitive traffic (e.g. conversational voice). A comparison is made between the performance of scheduled access for delay sensitive traffic and the contention-based Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) function defined in the IEEE 802.11e amendment. The performance evaluation considers the impact of scheduler design on the performance of the network. The results indicate that scheduled access is more robust to interference than EDCA, and that the choice of scheduling approach can have a significant impact on the data throughput achieved through the mesh at a given voice traffic load.