Admission control on multipath routing in 802.11-based wireless mesh networks

Admission control (AC) is a mechanism for meeting bandwidth requirements of data transmissions. Early research on admission control for wireless mesh networks (WMNs) was centered around single-path routing. Compared to single-path routing, parallel multipath routing may offer more reliable network services and better load balancing. Applying admission control to multipath routing could further improve service quality, but it also faces a number of challenges. For example, transmission on one path may affect transmission on a neighboring path. Addressing these challenges, this paper presents an AC algorithm on parallel multipath routing for WMNs. In particular, we formulate an optimization problem for achieving the best service based on available bandwidth and bandwidth consumption of to-be-admitted data sessions. While solving this problem is a complex task, we devise an optimal algorithm for selecting two node-disjoint paths with rate allocation, and propose a distributed multipath routing and admission control protocol to achieve a near-optimal solution. Simulations show that MRAC is efficient and effective in meeting bandwidth requirements. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.