An Effective QoS Differentiation Scheme for Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networking is emerging as an important architecture for future-generation wireless communications systems. Quality of service provisioning is a challenging issue in WMNs. In this article we study an effective QoS differentiation scheme for IEEE 802.16 WiMAX mesh networks. Both collocated and general topologies are exploited. Illustrative numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy. The impact of key parameters on performance is discussed for differentiating various services. Moreover, with the proposed scheme, WMN scalability can be greatly improved. The challenges with respect to the integration of WMN and cooperative transmission are discussed, and the fairness problem is addressed with potential solutions.