Capacity and QoS for a Scalable Ring-Based Wireless Mesh Network

The wireless mesh network (WMN) is an economical solution to support ubiquitous broadband services. This paper investigates the tradeoffs among quality-of-service (QoS), capacity, and coverage in a scalable multichannel ring-based WMN. We suggest a simple frequency planning in the proposed ring-based WMN to improve the capacity with QoS support, and to make the system more scalable in terms of coverage. We develop a physical (PHY)/medium access control (MAC) cross-layer analytical model to evaluate the delay, jitter, and throughput of the proposed WMN, by taking account of the carrier sense multiple-access (CSMA) MAC protocol, and the impact of hop distance on transmission rate in the physical layer. Furthermore, the mixed-integer nonlinear programming optimization approach is applied to determine the optimal number of rings and the associated ring widths, aiming at maximizing the capacity and coverage of a mesh cell subject to the delay requirement