Routing and link scheduling with QoS in IEEE 802.16 mesh networks

Quality of service (QoS) in wireless mesh networks is an active area of research which is driven by the increasing demand for multimedia content delivered wirelessly. The IEEE 802.16 (WiMAX) standard identifies four classes of service targeting throughput, delay, and jitter. In this paper, we achieve two main objectives. (1) We present a routing metric sensitive to both interference and throughput which proves effective in QoS provisioning, a link scheduling algorithm that can easily accommodate all four classes of service by using the concept of feasible intervals, and an effective channel allocation algorithm inspired by a constraint programming heuristic. (2) We prove that the usual approach of constructing routing trees centred at the base station could lock significant network resources. By simply switching to a session based routing strategy, we illustrate that the acceptance ratio under a congested network can improve by more than 10% when compared to the tree based routing driven by our interference and throughput aware metric and by more than 25% when the routing tree is constructed with the metric sensitive to interference only.