A multi-layer experimental study of multimedia and QoS communication in wireless mesh networks

A significant issue in Mesh networks is to support multimedia transmissions while providing Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees to mobile users. For real-time multimedia streaming, unstable throughput or insufficient bandwidth will incur unexpected delay or jitter, and it remains difficult to provide comprehensive service guarantees for a wireless mesh environment. In this paper, we target the problem of providing multimedia QoS in wireless mesh networks. We design and implement a campus test-bed for supporting multimedia traffic in mobile wireless mesh networks, and investigate in detail some possible improvements on a number of layers to enable multimedia transmission over wireless networks with QoS support. We first study a number of improvements of some existing routing protocols to support multimedia transmissions. Some new admission control and rate control mechanisms are studied and their performance gains are verified in our experiments. In our new cross-layer adaptive rate control (CLARC) mechanism, we adaptively change the video encoder’s output bit rate based on the available network bandwidth to improve the quality of the received video. We also design a mobile gateway protocol to connect the MANET to Internet and a wireless LAN management protocol to automatically manage WLAN to provide some QoS.