Class of Service Support Layer for Wireless Mesh Networks

This paper presents an add-on Class of Service (CoS) layer for wireless mesh networks. The proposed protocol is applicable for contention-based MACs and is therefore compatible with most of the Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) and Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) protocols. The protocol has a locally centralized control for managing data flows, which either reserve a fixed bandwidth or are weighted by fair scheduling. The protocol reduces transmission collisions, thus improving the overall throughput. IEEE 802.11 ad-hoc WLAN has been taken as a platform for simulations and prototyping for evaluating the protocol performance. Network Simulator Version 2 (NS2) simulations show that the CoS protocol efficiently differentiates bandwidth, supports bandwidth reservations, and reaches less than 10 ms transfer delay on IEEE 802.11b WLAN. Testing with a full prototype implementation verified the performance of the protocol.