Improving QoS Routing in Hybrid Wireless Mesh Networks, Using Cross-Layer Interaction and MAC Scheduling

Delivering Quality of Services (QoS) for cooperative Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) is an important issue when enabling heterogeneous wireless technologies on the client side. A standard approach for satisfying the QoS requirements of different wireless clients appears to be a complex task due to the capacity variations. In addition to the routing layer, the information at the lower layers, such as Physical and Medium Access Control (MAC) layers must be considered for providing the QoS guarantee. The strength of a signal received from heterogeneous clients at the physical layer and the coupled network capacity at the MAC layer plays an important role in the efficient path assignment and time scheduling management for routing. Therefore, this paper proposes an Adaptive Multipath-Dynamic Source Routing (AM-DSR) protocol. It supports Cross-Layer Interaction (CLI) for path assignment and MAC scheduling mechanism for slot assignment to improve the mesh backbone performance for providing multimedia services to various wireless clients in a hybrid WMN. The proposed strategy measures the cross-layer parameter, such as the network capacity, using the Signal to Noise Ratio (SINR) and assigns a route that maximizes the efficiency of the multimedia services. Finally, the performance evaluation shows that the proposed cross-layer based AM-DSR protocol provides efficient QoS support for the mesh backbone enabling connections to multiple clients.