Connection-Based Scheduling for Supporting Real-time Traffic in Wireless Mesh Networks

This paper studies real-time traffic scheduling in wireless mesh networks (WMNs). Optimum packet transmission scheduling providing strict latency guarantee for real-time traffic while efficiently utilizing the network resources in a WMN is difficult, and one of the main challenges is to coordinate temporal operations of the mesh access points (APs). In this paper a connection-based scheduling scheme is proposed. Scheduling decisions for connections with a larger number of hops are made first, and that for connections with a fewer number of hops are done by using the remaining resources. When scheduling packet transmissions for each connection, the transmitting time of the AP with the highest traffic load along the route of the connection is determined first. At each hop, the transmitting time of a packet is determined to minimize the latency to the upstream hop or from the downstream hop while keeping the total amount of required AP resources small. A connection-based optimization problem is formulated and solved with an objective to minimize the total amount of required AP resources, subject to the latency requirement of the connection. Numerical results show that the proposed scheduling scheme achieves close-to-optimum performance at both the connection and packet levels.