A Conflict-Free Low-Jitter Guaranteed-Rate MAC Protocol for Base-Station Communications in Wireless Mesh Networks

A scheduling algorithm and MAC protocol which provides low-jitter guaranteed-rate (GR) communications between base-stations (BS) in a Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is proposed. The protocol can provision long-term multimedia services such as VOIP, IPTV, or Video-on-Demand. The time-axis is partitioned into scheduling frames with F time-slots each. A directional antennae scheme is used to provide each directed link with a fixed transmission rate. A protocol such as IntServ is used to provision resources along an end-to-end path of BSs for GR sessions. The Guaranteed Rates between the BSs are then specified in a doubly stochastic traffic rate matrix, which is recursively decomposed to yield a low-jitter OR frame transmission schedule. In the resulting schedule, the end-to-end delay and jitter are small and bounded, and the cell loss rate due to primary scheduling conflicts is zero. For dual-channel WMNs, the MAC protocol can achieve 100% utilization, as well as near-minimal queueing delays and near minimal delay jitter. The scheduling time complexity is 0(NFlogNF), where N is the number of BSs. Extensive simulation results are presented.