A New Relay Node Selection Model for Wireless Community Mesh Networks

Abstract

In Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs), supporting Quality of Service (QoS) to enable a rich portfolio of applications/real-time multimedia applications is foreseen to be vital for the success of next generation networking technologies. However, today's cutting edge standards are not perfectly equipped to cater to this task. These standards come with an inherent complexity and suffer from innate problems with respect to QoS provisioning. Consequently, due to the limited resource of WMNs and increasingly demand of new applications, there is a need for devising innovative routing algorithms for supporting QoS on top of the existing standards. Thus, this paper presents a cross layer relay node selection scheme for routing protocols in order to offer optimal routes to real-time applications. Distinguished from guaranteeing a certain level of performance, our QoS scheme provides differentiated priorities and service levels to application with different needs. The scheme includes two parts. In the first part, we present an application priority model to update the application/priority table from the gateway periodically. Secondly, a new routing metric combining application priority, channel busy level and hop count, is deployed to evaluate and select the best from plurality possible paths during the communication phase. Our simulation experiments confirm the superiority of the proposed scheme against a number of existing counterparts.