Dynamic Bandwidth Control in Wireless Mesh Networks: A Quality of Experience based Approach

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are gaining an increasingly important role in next generation wireless networks. Due to their advantages over other wireless and wired networks, WMNs are undergoing rapid progress and are supposed to deliver wireless services for a large variety of applications. Especially real-time applications such as voice over IP make high demands on wireless mesh networks. A small change of the Quality-of-Service (QoS) metrics like packet loss, delay, and jitter have a significant impact on the Quality-of-Experience (QoE), a subjective measure from the user perspective of the overall value of the provided service or application. In this paper, we present a dynamic bandwidth control mechanism which measures the current situation in the network and adapts the bandwidth in order to ensure a high QoE level. The mechanism is implemented in a Wireless LAN mesh testbed and the results show that real-time applications are successfully protected from disturbing best effort traffic flows.