QoS in Wireless Mesh Networks : Challenges, Pitfalls, and Roadmap to its Realization
Parag S. Mogre, Matthias Hollick, Ralf Steinmetz · TUbilio (Technical University of Darmstadt) · 2007
Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have the potential to lead to a disruptive change in the landscape of wireless communications. The vision to support self-engineered wireless network infrastructures that allow for an organic growth of the network is to be realized by means of self-organizing mechanisms for network configuration, control and optimization. Supporting a Quality of Service (QoS) to enable a rich portfolio of applications and scenarios is foreseen to be vital for the success of next generation WMNs. Today’s cutting edge standards supporting WMNs (e.g. IEEE 802.16’s mesh mode and IEEE 802.11s) are not perfectly equipped to cater to this task. While providing the necessary flexibility as well as sophisticated protocol mechanisms, these standards come with an inherent complexity and suffer from innate problems with respect to QoS provisioning. As a result, care needs to be taken when developing algorithms for supporting QoS on top of the standard’s mechanisms or when deploying such WMNs. We believe that a holistic approach is necessary to tackle the challenge for truly enabling QoS in WMNs. Failure to do so will result in inefficient performance and, in the worst case QoS violations. This paper reviews the critical aspects that need to be considered using the IEEE 802.16-2004 standard’s mesh mode as a case-study. In addition to the research challenges, we highlight pitfalls and give pointers to realize QoS in WMNs.