A Load-Balancing QoS Routing Protocol for Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Recently, wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have received much attention, because they can serve as the last-mile for broadband Internet access in the next-generation communication systems. Traditionally, best effort traffic plays an important role in the Internet. However, as the capacity of network device increases, there are more and more QoS-aware applications appearing in the Internet. Thus, to serve as the backbone for Internet access, the routing protocol for WMNs must be able to handle heterogeneous traffic (i.e., QoS traffic and best effort traffic) simultaneously. In this thesis, we propose a load-balancing QoS routing (LBQR) protocol that can handle the two kinds of traffic. In addition, for efficient use of resource, we take the network load-balancing into consideration. LBQR protocol is implemented in a distributed manner, which is based on the destination-sequenced distance-vector routing (DSDV) protocol. We have simulated the proposed protocol under the IEEE 802.11 medium access control. The simulation results show that the proposed LBQR protocol has better performance than other protocols in the aspect of throughput for best effort sessions, admission ratio and end-to-end delay for QoS sessions.