Experimental Study of Measurement-based Admission Control for Wireless Mesh Networks

AbstractThe increased deployment of wireless meshnetworks (WMNs) should be complemented by a robustresource management scheme that can provide performanceguarantees to mission-critical applications. Severaladmission control schemes have been presented for wirelessLANs and wireless ad-hoc networks. However, wirelessmesh networks, with static wireless back-bone and multihopcommunication, pose new design challenges. Evaluationof existing admission control schemes has been doneprimarily via simulations, which often do not have accuratemodels for capturing interference between adjacent wirelesslinks and nodes. In this paper, we develop light-weightmonitoring modules to measure current network/trafficconditions and estimate end-to-end path delay, which isthen incorporated in our admission control decision. Weutilize a novel layer-2 packet forwarding mechanism, basedon the Wireless Distribution System (WDS) for WMNs. Weevaluate our scheme via experiments conducted on a testbedconsisting of IEEE 802.11a-based nodes that form awireless mesh. Results show that our proposed scheme canprovide performance assurance without incurring too muchcontrol overhead.9 Halama