HQMR: Hybrid QoS based Routing Protocol for Wireless Mesh Environment

International audienceWireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have been attracting more and more interest from both academic and industrial environments for their seamless broadband connectivity to Internet networks. Besides, providing QoS guarantees for real-time and streaming applications such as Voice over IP (VoIP) and Video on Demand (VoD) is a challenging issue in such environment. Thus, we propose a novel QoS based routing protocol for wireless mesh infrastructure, called Hybrid QoS Mesh Routing (HQMR). Moreover, a clustering algorithm is developed to enhance scalability issues within the mesh infrastructure. HQMR is composed of two routing sub-protocols: a reactive routing protocol for intra-infrastructure communications and a proactive QoS based multi-tree routing protocol for communications with external networks. The proposed routing protocol ensures forwarding real-time and streaming applications with QoS guarantee in a mesh wireless environment. We analyze in this paper the simulation results of different scenarios conducted on the network simulator ns-3 to demonstrate the effectiveness of the reactive routing subprotocol in forwarding real-time applications with QoS guarantee