Integrated connection-level and packet-level QoS controls over wireless mesh networks

This paper focuses on integrating connection-level and packet-level QoS controls over wireless mesh network (WMN) to support applications with diverse QoS performance requirements. At the connection-level, the dynamic guard based prioritized connection admission control (DG-PCAC) provides prioritized admission with relative connection blocking probabilities and end-to-end deterministic minimum bandwidth allocation guarantees. DG-PCAC is enabled by dynamic guard based logical link configuration controls (LCCs), which provides relative differentiated capacity limits for prioritized admission classes. At the packet-level, the optimal rate delay scheduler (ORDS) dynamically allocates link bandwidth to the admitted flows of prioritized traffic classes; with the objective to minimize deviation from relative delay targets with minimum bandwidth guarantees according to traffic classes. Two realizations of the ORDS are presented, namely optimal scheduling policy via dynamic programming (DP) algorithm, and neural network (NN) based heuristic to alleviate computational complexity. Performance results show that the DG-PCAC enables consistent performance guarantees under non-stationary arrivals of connection requests. Performance results also show that the performance of the NN based scheduling heuristic approaches to that of the DP based optimal ORDS scheme. (c) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.