Connection admission control and grade of service for QoS routing in mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) is a promising key technology for next generation wireless backhauling that have recently attracted both the academic and industrial interest. Such networks are expected to have high throughput demands and support various types of applications with different quality-of-service (QoS) constraints. Opportunistic scheduling has been proven highly beneficial in such networks since it takes advantage of the dynamic nature of the channel between different wireless mesh routers. Recently a promising cross-layered framework has been proposed (IQoSR, [1], [2]) that combines a distributed opportunistic scheduler with a multi-constrained QoS routing scheme and has been proven to outperform conventional layer 2 and 3 approaches. However, opportunistic scheduling cannot provide hard resource reservation; therefore, the admission of new flows in a route may jeopardize the QoS of the ongoing flows. In order to overcome this problem, in this work we introduce a connection admission control (CAC) scheme for different levels of QoS to efficiently manage the resources among existing and new flows. In this way, we improve the overall network performance and minimize the outage probability of the ongoing flows while we guarantee the required grade-of-service (GoS) to the underlying applications. Simulation analysis shows that the proposed scheme achieves lower blocking probability while it reduces the outage probability of the existing flows.