QoS based routing protocol for intra-mesh infrastructure communications

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have been considered as a promising alternative to conventional wired networks, thanks to its flexibility and easy deployment. Thus, to ensure a satisfying level of QoS guarantees for real-time and streaming applications such as Voice over IP (VoIP) and Video on Demand (VoD), we propose a novel QoS based routing protocol for wireless mesh environments, called Hybrid QoS Mesh Routing (HQMR), jointly with a clustering algorithm to enhance scalability issues within the mesh infrastructure. HQMR is composed of two routing sub-protocols: a reactive routing sub-protocol for intra-infrastructure communications and a proactive QoS based multi-tree routing sub-protocol for communications with external networks. In this paper, we describe and analyze the simulation results of different scenarios conducted on the network simulator ns-3 to demonstrate the effectiveness of our clustering algorithm and of the Intra-Mesh Infrastructure Reactive Routing (IMRR) protocol in forwarding real-time applications with QoS guarantee while reducing network overhead.