QoS-aware fair rate allocation in wireless mesh networks

Abstract

In wireless mesh networks, quality-of-service (QoS) support and fair rate allocation are usually considered separately. Fair rate allocation frameworks proposed in previous work focus on elastic flows that do not have explicit service quality requirements. Such frameworks may not be applied directly within mesh networks containing real-time flows that have explicit rate and delay requirements. QoS support frameworks for wireless networks guarantee service quality of real-time flows by reserving bandwidth for them. However, the major drawbacks of existing approaches are the inefficiency and the lack of fairness consideration in bandwidth allocation, which results in poor performance of elastic flows. In this paper, we propose QUOTA (quality-of-service aware fair rate allocation), a framework that combines QoS support and fair rate allocation. QUOTA provides higher priority to real-time flows than elastic flows by reserving the necessary bandwidth for the former and fairly allocating the left-over bandwidth to the latter. The performance of QUOTA is evaluated through simulations and is compared with other QoS support and rate allocation frameworks.