Connection-based scheduling for supporting real-time traffic in wireless mesh networks

Packet transmission scheduling for supporting real-time traffic in a WMN is difficult, and one of the main challenges is to coordinate temporal operations of the mesh access points (APs) in order to provide strict latency guarantee while efficiently utilizing the radio resources. In this paper a connection-based scheduling (CBS) scheme is proposed. Connections with more hops are given a higher priority, and connections with a lower priority can only use resources remaining from serving all higher priority ones. For each multihop connection, the scheduling minimizes latency between successive hops. A connection-based optimization problem is formulated with an objective to minimize the amount of required AP resources, subject to the latency requirement of the connections. Numerical results show that the proposed scheduling scheme achieves close-to-optimum performance at both the connection and packet levels.