G-BFS: A Scheme for Scheduling Real-Time CBR Traffic in IEEE 802.11-Based Mesh Networks

A bottleneck first scheduling (BFS) scheme was proposed in our previous work for scheduling constant bit rate (CBR) real-time traffic in a wireless mesh network with a tree topology. In this paper we extend the BFS scheme for scheduling CBR real-time traffic in a mesh network with a more general topology. We consider an IEEE 802.11-based infrastructure wireless mesh network, where access points (APs) form a graph topology for forwarding traffic inside the mesh network or between the mesh network and the wireline backbone network. The new scheduling scheme is referred to as G-BFS, where “G” stands for “graph”. We also model the scheduling problem and find the suboptimal performance. Our results show that the proposed G-BFS scheduling scheme achieves a capacity very close to the suboptimal capacity, while keeping low packet transmission delay.