Distributed resource reservation for real time sessions in multi-hop wireless networks

Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning in multi-hop wireless networks (MHWNs) has become a promising and challenging topic in the wireless communication research community. In this paper, a novel distributed MAC scheduling protocol with reservation mechanism is proposed for enhancing the QoS performance of IEEE 802.11e-based MHWNs. The proposed mechanism guarantees resources in pre-configured contention-free period (CFP) for real-time sessions (RTSNs) in the network in a distributed manner. Here, resource reservation (RR) for multiple sessions can be made without any collision through an effective signalling process which coordinates the RR for RTSNs. Distributed admission control (AC) ensures that the existing RTSNs are not violated from QoS guarantees. In addition, a concurrent transmission (CT) mechanism is implemented within the pre-configured CFP. This is to further improve the bandwidth utilization by synchronizing the reserved transmissions among different nodes which do not interfere with each other. Simulation results indicate that the proposed scheduling mechanism can address the problems posed by inter- and intra-flow interference and can achieve guaranteed QoS for admitted RTSNs while providing fairness for the other sessions in the network.