The WICKPro protocol with the Packet Delivery Ratio metric

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) with chain topologies are very useful in road and railroad transportation or in tunnel and mine applications. The proposed protocols for WMNs usually support best-effort traffic or some kind of Quality of Service (QoS). However, some applications such as remote-controlled machines in industrial control networks have hard real-time (HRT) requirements, i.e., strict deadlines. For this reason, this paper incorporates the Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) metric into the WICKPro (Wireless Chain networK Protocol) protocol, a HRT protocol for WMNs with chain topologies which uses a token-passing approach. WICKPro is a Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol based on the ideas of the Timed-token protocol and the cyclic executive. The incorporation of the PDR metric lets calculate the needed time to be reserved where packet retransmissions can be accommodated while satisfying HRT traffic constraints. Moreover, the feasibility of using the PDR metric in a token-passing protocol is shown. Since WICKPro has been designed to work on top of IEEE 802.11, we made a testbed using commercial 802.11 wireless cards and compared the WICKPro's performance with the 802.11 protocol and three specific protocols for WMNs with chain topologies. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.