A new MPLS-based Quality of Service architecture for Wireless Mesh Networks

In this work we describe and analyze a new Quality of Service (QoS) architecture for wireless mesh networks. Such architecture is mainly composed of two components, i.e. a new admission control criteria for flows and a new link metric. The first allows to only admit flows whose required QoS (specified in terms of bandwidth) can be guaranteed, while the latter allows to maximize the number of accepted flows. In particular, the admission control criteria is designed to precisely evaluate the available bandwidth of the WMN links, which depends not only on the transmission rate of the link but also on the number and the transmission rates of the links in the neighboorhood working on the same channel. The new link metric, instead, is designed to select paths for flows so as to reduce the usage of resources. The proposed architecture relies on the ability of explicitly routing flows. To this purpose, we chose to employ MPLS (Multi Protocol Label Switching), which is able to finely control the path of each single flow. Such possibility further allows to increase the number of accepted flows by exploiting bandwidth where available.