Cross-Layer Transmission Scheme with QoS Considerations for Wireless Mesh Networks

IEEE 802.11 wireless networks utilizes a hard handoff scheme when a station is travelling from one area of coverage to another one within a transmission duration. In IEEE 802.11s wireless mesh networks, the handoff procedure the transmitted data will first be buffered in the source MAP and be not relayed to the target MAP until the handoff procedure is finished. Besides, there are multi-hop in the path between the source station and the destination station. In each pair of neighboring MAPs, contention is needed to transmit data. The latency for successfully transmitting data is seriously lengthened so that the deadlines of data frames are missed with high probabilities. In this paper, we propose a cross-layer transmission (CLT) scheme with QoS considerations for IEEE 802.11 mesh wireless networks. By utilizing CLT, the ratios of missing deadlines will be significantly improved to conform strict time requirements for real-time multimedia applications. We develop a simulation model to investigate the performance of CLT. The capability of the proposed scheme is evaluated by a series of experiments, for which we have encouraging results.