A traffic aggregation and differentiation scheme for enhanced QoS in IEEE 802.11-based Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks are currently emerging as a promising paradigm for broadband ubiquitous Internet access. However, their distributed nature raises many challenges when facing the increasing demand for multimedia applications, which require a tight control over the system’s available resources. In this paper, we address such issue by introducing a mechanism combining service differentiation and packet aggregation in IEEE 802.11-based WMNs. Our architecture does not require any modification to the IEEE 802.11 MAC and can be readily deployed exploiting off-the-shelf hardware. The proposed solution has been implemented as an extension to the MIT Roofnet platform. Measurements run over a WiFi testbed show a large gain in the voice capacity attained. The source code, released under the BSD License, is made available to the research community.