Time-Driven Access and Forwarding in IEEE 802.11 Mesh Networks

Various solutions based on both prioritization and resource allocation have been proposed in the literature and standard bodies to support end-to-end quality of service (QoS) in wireless multihop scenarios. However, their performance is not satisfactory in terms of achievable overall network throughput and tradeoff between end-to-end delay and network utilization. This paper proposes time-driven access and forwarding (TAF), a novel multilevel solution to guarantee deterministic end-to-end QoS for real-time traffic and improve overall network throughput and utilization in 802.11 mesh networks.