Adaptive per hop differentiation for end-to-end delay assurance in multihop wireless networks

As the rapid growth of smart hand-held devices, multihop wireless access networks have a lot of potential applications in a variety of fields in civilian and military environments. Many of these applications, such as realtime audio/video streaming, will require some form of end-to-end QoS assurance. In this paper, we present an adaptive per hop differentiation (APHD) scheme towards achieving end-to-end delay assurance in multihop wireless networks. Our scheme is based on EDCA technique which is proposed in 802.11e draft. In EDCA, data packets of different priorities will use different MAC contention parameter set, which translate into different delays. Our APHD scheme extends the capability of EDCA into multihop environment by taking end-to-end delay requirement into consideration at each intermediate hop. Following a cross-layer design approach, APHD is aimed to be a distributed and localized technique. Individual nodes keep track of the channel state independently without any intercommunication overhead. Data packets carry end-to-end delay requirement along with other important information in the packet header. At an intermediate node, based on data packet’s end-to-end requirement, its accumulative delay so far, and the current node’s channel status, APHD smartly adjusts data packet’s priority level in order to satisfy its end-to-end delay requirement. Simulation results show that APHD scheme can provide excellent end-to-end delay assurance while achieving much higher network utilization, compared to a pure EDCA scheme.