Maintaining Dependable Communication Service for Mobile Stations in Wireless Mesh Networks by Tracking Capacity Demands

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) form communication networks that combine high flexibility due to self-organization within a completely wireless infrastructure and reliability due to the meshed topology. A fundamental aspect to provide dependable communication in such networks is the avoidance of network overload, which might cause significant packet loss and unbounded time delays. For this purpose, admission control mechanisms have been elaborated to determine the available network capacity and the capacity demands for new communication flows. However, even if a precise assessment of the capacity is available, the presence of mobile stations in the network cause a variation of the network capacity. When a station moves, its capacity demands may increase due to a longer path which may incur the violation of QoS guarantees. We propose a scheme to track the capacity demands of mobile stations and consider these on admission decisions. We show that this approach allows to maintain a dependable communication service even in presence of mobile stations and thus improve the applicability of WMNs for dependable mobile applications.