MARIA: Interference-Aware Admission Control and QoS Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks

Interference among concurrent transmissions complicates QoS provisioning for multimedia applications in wireless mesh networks. In this paper we propose MARIA (mesh admission control and QoS routing with interference awareness), a scheme towards enhancing QoS support for multimedia in wireless mesh networks. We characterize interference in wireless networks using a conflict graph based model. Nodes exchange their flow information periodically and compute their available residual bandwidth based on the local maximal clique constraints. Admission decision is made based on the residual bandwidth at each node. We implement an on-demand routing scheme that explicitly incorporates the interference model in the route discovery process. It directs routing message propagations and avoids "hot-spots" with severe interference. Simulation results demonstrate that by taking interference into account MARIA outperforms the conventional approach. It finds routes with less interference and enhances the performance significantly. We use video as an example application and MARIA improves the quality of delivered videos, with up to 7.3 dB average PSNR gain.