Adaptive packet scheduling scheme to support real-time traffic in WLAN mesh networks

Due to multiple hops, mobility and time-varying channel, supporting delay sensitive real-time traffic in wireless local area network-based (WLAN) mesh networks is a challenging task. In particular for real-time traffic subject to medium access control (MAC) layer control overhead, such as preamble, carrier sense waiting time and the random backoff period, the performance of real-time flows will be degraded greatly. In order to support real-time traffic, an efficient adaptive packet scheduling (APS) scheme is proposed, which aims to improve the system performance by guaranteeing inter-class, intra-class service differentiation and adaptively adjusting the packet length. APS classifies incoming packets by the IEEE 802.11e access class and then queued into a suitable buffer queue. APS employs strict priority service discipline for resource allocation among different service classes to achieve inter-class fairness. By estimating the received signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) per bit and current link condition, APS is able to calculate the optimized packet length with bi-dimensional markov MAC model to improve system performance. To achieve the fairness of intra-class, APS also takes maximum tolerable packet delay, transmission requests, and average allocation transmission into consideration to allocate transmission opportunity to the corresponding traffic. Detailed simulation results and comparison with IEEE 802.11e enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) scheme show that the proposed APS scheme is able to effectively provide inter-class and intra-class differentiate services and improve QoS for real-time traffic in terms of throughput, end-to-end delay, packet loss rate and fairness.