Given the evolution of wireless technologies, Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) have appeared as an emerging low-cost solution to ensure last-mile connectivity to the Internet network. However, providing real-time and streaming applications, such as VoIP (Voice over IP) and VoD (Video on Demand), with a satisfying QoS level is considered as an important challenge within these networks. In this paper, we propose a QoS based routing protocol, called Hybrid QoS Mesh Routing (HQMR), jointly with a clustering algorithm to improve the scalability of mesh networks. HQMR is composed of two routing subprotocols: a reactive QoS based routing protocol for intra-mesh infrastructure communications and a proactive QoS based multitree routing protocol for communications with external networks. We analyze in this paper the simulation results of different scenarios conducted on the network simulator ns-3 to demonstrate the effectiveness of the reactive routing sub-protocol while forwarding real-time applications with a QoS guarantee.

No abstract

International audienceQuality of service (QoS) in wireless mesh networks is an active area of research, which is driven by the increasing demand for real-time and multimedia applications, such as Voice over IP and Video on Demand. In this paper, we propose a novel QoS based routing protocol for wireless mesh infrastructure, called Hybrid QoS Mesh Routing (HQMR). It is composed of two QoS based routing sub-protocols: a reactive multi-metric routing protocol for intra-infrastructure communications and a proactive multi-tree based routing protocol for communications with external networks. The proposed routing protocol enables forwarding real-time and streaming applications with QoS guarantee in a mesh wireless environment, by assigning a specific routing path for each defined service class. To this end, three different QoS service classes are defined, depending on the applications requirements. We analyze in this paper the simulation results of different scenarios conducted on the network simulator ns-3 to demonstrate the effectiveness of the HQMR protocol and to compare it to other routing protocols while forwarding real-time applications with QoS guarantee