A comprehensive survey on scheduler for VoIP over WLAN

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology has observed rapid growth in the world of telecommunications. VoIP offers high-rate voice services at low cost with good flexibility, typically in a Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN). In a voice conversation, each client works either as a sender or a receiver depending on the direction of traffic flow over the network. A VoIP technologically requires high throughput, less packet loss and a high fairness index over the network. The packets of VoIP streaming may experience drops because of competition among the different kinds of traffic flow over the network. A VoIP application is also sensitive to delays and requires voice packets to arrive on time from the sender to the receiver without any delay over a WLAN. To date, scheduling of VoIP traffic is still an unresolved problem. The objectives of this survey paper are to discuss fundamental principles of VoIP-related schedulers and identify current scheduler issues. This survey paper also identifies the importance of the scheduling techniques over WLANs. Related research work for real-time applications specifically for VoIP will also be highlighted.     

A cross-layer TCP enhancement in QoS-aware mobile ad hoc networks

With the increase of multimedia traffic over the Internet, current network protocols are largely concerned with the QoS requirements of delay-sensitive applications. In Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs), the majority of protocols developed to date provide QoS mechanisms by assigning high priority to delay-sensitive applications. While today’s Internet traffic is still dominated by TCP-based applications, the negative effects of the IEEE 802.11e service differentiation scheme on TCP performance in the presence of high priority traffic have not been adequately addressed in the literature. In this paper we first evaluate the performance of TCP in 802.11e MANETs when competing with high priority VoIP traffic. We then propose a novel TCP-friendly scheme, called IEDCA, to improve IEEE 802.11e EDCA mechanism. Our simulation-based performance study demonstrates that our proposed scheme IEDCA not only improves the performance of TCP significantly, it also facilitates the voice traffic transmission.     

OLSR-aware channel access scheduling in wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a key technology having various advantages, especially in providing cost-effective coverage and connectivity solutions in both rural and urban areas. WMNs are typically deployed as backbone networks, usually employing spatial TDMA (STDMA)-based access schemes which are suitable for the high traffic demands of WMNs. This paper aims to achieve higher utilization of the network capacity and thereby aims to increase the application layer throughput of STDMA-based WMNs. The central idea is to use optimized link state routing (OLSR)-specific routing layer information in link layer channel access schedule formation. This paper proposes two STDMA-based channel access scheduling schemes (one distributed, one centralized) that exploit OLSR-specific information to improve the application layer throughput without introducing any additional messaging overhead. To justify the contribution of using OLSR-specific information to the throughput, the proposed schemes are compared against one another and against their non-OLSR-aware versions via extensive ns-2 simulations. Our simulation results verify that utilizing OLSR-specific information significantly improves the overall network performance both in distributed and in centralized schemes. The simulation results further show that OLSR-aware scheduling algorithms attain higher end-to-end throughput although their non-OLSR-aware counterparts achieve higher concurrency in slot allocations.     

Enhancing multi-hop communication over multi-radio multi-channel wireless mesh networks: A cross-layer approach

The multi-channel multi-radio technology represents a straightforward approach to expand the capacity of wireless mesh networks (WMNs) in broadband wireless access scenarios. However, the effective leveraging of this technology in WMNs requires (i) enhanced MAC protocols, to coordinate the access to multiple channels with a limited number of radio interfaces, and (ii) efficient channel allocation schemes, to mitigate the impact of co-channel interference. The design of channel assignment schemes and MAC protocols is strictly interrelated, so that joint design should be considered to optimize the mesh network performance. In this paper, a channel assignment and fast MAC architecture (CAFMA) is proposed, which exploits the benefits provided by the multi-channel multi-radio technology to (i) enhance the performance of multi-hop communications, (ii) maximize the resource utilization, and (iii) support differentiation of traffic classes with different quality of service (QoS) requirements. CAFMA is designed with a cross-layer approach and includes (1) a novel MAC scheme, which provides multi-channel coordination and fast data relaying over multi-hop topologies, and (2) a distributed channel allocation scheme, which works in cooperation with the routing protocol. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of CAFMA when compared with other single-layer and cross-layer solutions for multi-radio multi-channel WMNs.     

Design and implementation of MobiSEC: A complete security architecture for wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged recently as a technology for next-generation wireless networking. They consist of mesh routers and clients, where mesh routers are almost static and form the backbone of WMNs. WMNs provide network access for both mesh and conventional clients.In this paper we propose MobiSEC, a complete security architecture that provides both access control for mesh users and routers as well as a key distribution scheme that supports layer-2 encryption to ensure security and data confidentiality of all communications that occur in the WMN.MobiSEC extends the IEEE 802.11i standard exploiting the routing capabilities of mesh routers; after connecting to the access network as generic wireless clients, new mesh routers authenticate to a central server and obtain a temporary key that is used both to prove their credentials to neighbor nodes and to encrypt all the traffic transmitted on the wireless backbone links.A key feature in the design of MobiSEC is its independence from the underlying wireless technology used by network nodes to form the backbone. Furthermore, MobiSEC allows seamless mobility of both mesh clients and routers.MobiSEC has been implemented and integrated in MobiMESH, a WMN implementation that provides a complete framework for testing and analyzing the behavior of a mesh network in real-life environments. Moreover, extensive simulations have been performed in large-scale network scenarios using Network Simulator.Numerical results show that our proposed architecture considerably increases the WMN security, with a negligible impact on the network performance, thus representing an effective solution for wireless mesh networking.     

一种基于WiMAX mesh网络的区分服务调度方案

IEEE 802.16支持多种不同类型的调度服务,并将服务质量支持机制引入媒体接入控制层,却没有规定相应的调度算法。在IEEE 802.16定义的mesh模式下,针对不同类型服务,提出了一种区分服务的调度方案,该方案采用集中式和分布式混合调度。仿真结果表明:该方案下系统平均时延和用户满意度均有所改善。     

Load-aware routing in mesh networks: Models, algorithms and experimentation

In this paper we consider wireless mesh networks (WMNs) used to share the Internet connectivity of sparsely deployed fixed lines with heterogeneous capacity, ranging from ISP-owned high-speed links to subscriber-owned low-speed connections. If traffic is routed in the mesh without considering the load distribution and the bandwidth of Internet connections, some gateways may rapidly get overloaded because they are selected by too many mesh nodes. This may cause a significant reduction of the overall network capacity. To address this issue, in this paper we first develop a queuing network model that predicts the residual capacity of network paths, and identifies network bottlenecks. By taking advantage of this model, we design a novel Load-Aware Route Selection algorithm, named LARS, which improves the network capacity by allocating network paths to upstream Internet flows so as to ensure a more balanced utilization of wireless network resources and gateways’ Internet connections. Using simulations and a prototype implementation, we show that the LARS scheme significantly outperforms the shortest-path first routing protocol using a contention-aware routing metric, providing up to 240% throughput improvement in some network scenarios.     

WiMAX拓展实时轮询调度机制分析

为了提高无线资源的利用率,使WiMAX系统更好地支持语音业务,基于IEEE 802.16e协议的QoS调度体系,提出了针对带有静默压缩语音业务的拓展实时轮询调度机制的具体实现方案.而且通过对方案中关键参数的分析,给出了一种QoS保证方法.方法根据用户时延对数据带宽分配进行补偿,并按照用户负载情况动态地调整轮询请求带宽的分配周期.使用OPNET软件进行了系统级性能评估,结果表明所提出的方法可有效地降低用户上行接入时延和上行丢包率,从而提高了通信质量.     

Local search methods for efficient router nodes placement in wireless mesh networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are an important networking infrastructure for providing cost-efficient broadband wireless connectivity to a group of users. WMNs are increasingly being used in urban, metropolitan and municipal area networks for deployment of medical, transport, surveillance systems, etc. The performance and operability of WMNs largely depends on placement of mesh routers nodes in the geographical area to achieve network connectivity and stability. The objective is to find an optimal and robust topology of the mesh router network to support intelligent telecommunication services to clients such as adaptive and flexible wireless Internet access, mobile data, voice, video in addition to supporting other preferred client services. In this work, we propose and evaluate local search methods for intelligent placement of mesh routers in WMNs with a two fold objective: maximizing the size of the giant component in the network and user coverage. Given a grid area where to distribute a given number of mesh router nodes, which can have different radio coverage, and a number of fixed clients a priori distributed in the given area, local search methods explore different local movements and incrementally improve the quality of the router nodes placement in terms of network connectivity and user coverage. We have experimentally evaluated the proposed local search methods through a benchmark of generated instances of varying sizes. Moreover, different distributions of mesh clients (Uniform, Normal, Exponential and Weibull) are used. The experimental evaluation showed the good performance of local search methods for optimizing network connectivity and user coverage in WMNs.     

Routing Internet traffic in heterogeneous mesh networks: Analysis and algorithms

In practical wireless mesh networks (WMNs), gateways are subject to hard capacity limits on the aggregate number of flows (in terms of bit rate) that they can support. Thus, if traffic is routed in the mesh network without considering those constraints, as well as the traffic distribution, some gateways or intermediate mesh routers may rapidly get overloaded, and the network resources can be unevenly utilized. To address this problem, in this paper we firstly develop a multi-class queuing network model to analyze feasible throughput allocations, as well as average end-to-end delay, in heterogeneous WMNs. Guided by our analysis, we design a Capacity-Aware Route Selection algorithm (CARS), which allocates network paths to downstream and upstream Internet flows so as to ensure a more balanced utilization of wireless network resources and gateways’ fixed connections. Through simulations in a number of different network scenarios we show that the CARS scheme significantly outperforms conventional shortest path routing, as well as an alternative routing method that distributes the traffic load on the gateway nodes to minimize its variance.     

An efficient joint channel assignment and QoS routing protocol for IEEE 802.11 multi-radio multi-channel wireless mesh networks

With the emerging of video, voice over IP (VoIP) and other real-time multimedia services, more and more people pay attention to quality of service (QoS) issues in terms of the bandwidth, delay and jitter, etc. As one effective way of broadband wireless access, it has become imperative for wireless mesh networks (WMNs) to provide QoS guarantee. Existing works mostly modify QoS architecture dedicated for ad hoc or sensor networks, and focus on single radio and single channel case. Meanwhile, they study the QoS routing or MAC protocol from view of isolated layer. In this paper, we propose a novel cross-layer QoS-aware routing protocol on OLSR (CLQ-OLSR) to support real-time multimedia communication by efficiently exploiting multi-radio and multi-channel method. By constructing multi-layer virtual logical mapping over physical topology, we implement two sets of routing mechanisms, physical modified OLSR protocol (M-OLSR) and logical routing, to accommodate network traffic. The proposed CLQ-OLSR is based on a distributed bandwidth estimation scheme, implemented at each node for estimating the available bandwidth on each associated channel. By piggybacking the bandwidth information in HELLO and topology control (TC) messages, each node disseminates information of topology and available bandwidth to other nodes in the whole network in an efficient way. From topology and bandwidth information, the optimized path can be identified. Finally, we conduct extensive simulation to verify the performance of CLQ-OLSR in different scenarios on QualNet platform. The results demonstrate that our proposed CLQ-OLSR outperforms single radio OLSR, multi-radio OLSR and OLSR with differentiated services (DiffServ) in terms of network aggregate throughput, end-to-end packet delivery ratio, delay and delay jitter with reasonable message overheads and hardware costs. In particular, the network aggregate throughput for CLQ-OLSR can almost be improved by 300% compared with the single radio case.     

An IMS-based network architecture for WiMAX-UMTS and WiMAX-WLAN interworking

The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) seems to be the technology that will prevail in Next Generation Networks (NGNs), since the interworking environment and the service flexibility that this technology offers to the currently deployed wireless broadband technologies makes it appealing to users, service developers and network operators. In this paper we propose a heterogeneous network model based on the IMS that integrates the Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX), Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) and Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) technologies and provides guaranteed QoS. We present the complete signalling flow concerning the authorization, registration, session set up and vertical handoff processes, as well as, an analytic model for cost analysis of the proposed architecture.     

Slot allocation algorithms in centralized scheduling scheme for IEEE 802.16 based wireless mesh networks

In IEEE 802.16 based wireless mesh networks (WMNs), TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) is employed as the channel access method and only TDD (Time Division Duplex) is supported and there are no clearly separate downlink and uplink subframes in the physical frame structure. As the uplink and downlink traffic has different characteristics in that the uplink traffic decentralizes in each MSS (Mesh Subscriber Station) and the downlink traffic centralizes in the MBS (Mesh Base Station), different scheduling methods should be taken in the uplink and downlink. This paper presents a uniform slot allocation algorithm which is suitable for both uplinks and downlinks. To achieve higher spatial reuse and greater throughput and to avoid switching frequently between receiving and transmitting within two adjacent time slots when a relay node forwards traffic, different link selection criteria are taken into account when allocating slots for uplinks and downlinks. A combined uplink and downlink slot allocation algorithm is proposed for further improving the spatial reuse and network throughput. The proposed algorithms are evaluated by extensive simulations and the results show that it has good performance in terms of spatial reuse and network throughput. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this work is the first one that considers combined uplink and downlink slot allocation on the centralized scheduling scheme in IEEE 802.16 based WMNs.     

SafeMesh: A wireless mesh network routing protocol for incident area communications

Reliable broadband communication is becoming increasingly important during disaster recovery and emergency response operations. In situations where infrastructure-based communication is not available or has been disrupted, an Incident Area Network needs to be dynamically deployed, i.e. a temporary network that provides communication services for efficient crisis management at an incident site. Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are multi-hop wireless networks with self-healing and self-configuring capabilities. These features, combined with the ability to provide wireless broadband connectivity at a comparably low cost, make WMNs a promising technology for incident management communications. This paper specifically focuses on hybrid WMNs, which allow both mobile client devices as well as dedicated infrastructure nodes to form the network and provide routing and forwarding functionality. Hybrid WMNs are the most generic and most flexible type of mesh networks and are ideally suited to meet the requirements of incident area communications. However, current wireless mesh and ad-hoc routing protocols do not perform well in hybrid WMN, and are not able to establish stable and high throughput communication paths. One of the key reasons for this is their inability to exploit the typical high degree of heterogeneity in hybrid WMNs. SafeMesh, the routing protocol presented in this paper, addresses the limitations of current mesh and ad-hoc routing protocols in the context of hybrid WMNs. SafeMesh is based on the well-known AODV routing protocol, and implements a number of modifications and extensions that significantly improve its performance in hybrid WMNs. This is demonstrated via an extensive set of simulation results. We further show the practicality of the protocol through a prototype implementation and provide performance results obtained from a small-scale testbed deployment.     

Can the current generation of wireless mesh networks compete with cellular voice?

Wireless mesh networks are being deployed to provide broadband wireless connectivity to city-wide hotspots. The typical architecture in these deployments thus far is a single-radio architecture: mesh nodes carry only one radio, which is used both to receive the traffic from the clients and to relay this traffic through the mesh to the wired Internet gateway.In this paper, we study the performance of a representative single-radio mesh network both in a live setup and in a laboratory environment. We characterize the performance of different applications (e.g. VoIP), and study some key challenges of mesh networks such as the fairness in bandwidth allocation and hidden node terminal. Finally, we compare the results of the study with traditional cellular networks, and discuss various options to enhance the performance of wireless mesh networks in the future.     

Optimization models and methods for planning wireless mesh networks

In this paper novel optimization models are proposed for planning Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs), where the objective is to minimize the network installation cost while providing full coverage to wireless mesh clients. Our mixed integer linear programming models allow to select the number and positions of mesh routers and access points, while accurately taking into account traffic routing, interference, rate adaptation, and channel assignment. We provide the optimal solutions of three problem formulations for a set of realistic-size instances (with up to 60 mesh devices) and discuss the effect of different parameters on the characteristics of the planned networks. Moreover, we propose and evaluate a relaxation-based heuristic for large-sized network instances which jointly solves the topology/coverage planning and channel assignment problems. Finally, the quality of the planned networks is evaluated under different traffic conditions through detailed system level simulations.     

An Overlay Architecture for High-Quality VoIP Streams

The cost savings and novel features associated with voice over IP (VoIP) are driving its adoption by service providers. Unfortunately, the Internet's best effort service model provides no quality of service guarantees. Because low latency and jitter are the key requirements for supporting high-quality interactive conversations, VoIP applications use UDP to transfer data, thereby subjecting themselves to quality degradations caused by packet loss and network failures. In this paper, we describe an architecture to improve the performance of such VoIP applications. Two protocols are used for localized packet loss recovery and rapid rerouting in the event of network failures. The protocols are deployed on the nodes of an application-level overlay network and require no changes to the underlying infrastructure. Experimental results indicate that the architecture and protocols can be combined to yield voice quality on par with the public switched telephone network     

A hierarchical architecture for detecting selfish behaviour in community wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) consist of dedicated nodes called mesh routers which relay the traffic generated by mesh clients over multi-hop paths. In a community WMN, all mesh routers may not be managed by an Internet Service Provider (ISP). Limited capacity of wireless channels and lack of a single trusted authority in such networks can motivate mesh routers to behave selfishly by dropping relay traffic in order to provide a higher throughput to their own users. Existing solutions for stimulating cooperation in multi-hop networks use promiscuous monitoring or exchange probe packets to detect selfish nodes and apply virtual currency mechanism to compensate the cooperating nodes. These schemes fail to operate well when applied to WMNs which have a multi-radio environment with a relatively static topology. In this paper we, propose architecture for a community WMN which can detect selfish behaviour in the network and enforce cooperation among mesh routers. The architecture adopts a decentralized detection scheme by dividing the mesh routers into manageable clusters. Monitoring agents hosted on managed mesh routers monitor the behaviour of mesh routers in their cluster by collecting periodic reports and sending them to the sink agents hosted at the mesh gateways. To make the detection more accurate we consider the quality of wireless links. We present experimental results that evaluate the performance of our scheme.     

Enhanced MAC protocol to support multimedia traffic in cognitive wireless mesh networks

With the advanced physical layer techniques such as multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) and orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), transmission real-time 2D/3D contents and applications becomes more and more necessary in wireless networks for the amazing growing in demand of customers. However, the low efficiency of medium access control (MAC) protocol degrades the performance of real-time traffic greatly in multihop, wireless and mobile environment. Focusing on supporting real-time multimedia traffic in cognitive wireless mesh networks (WMNs), an enhanced MAC protocol is proposed. And the contribution of this paper is twofold: (1) An efficient carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) compatible time division multiple access (TDMA)-like MAC protocol called T-MAC is proposed, which aims to improve the system performance by allocating more channel access time in centralized manner and decreasing overhead. (2) An optimal adaptive scheduling scheme is proposed to support real-time multimedia applications and guarantee QoS for different priority traffic, which aims to find the optimized schedule among all possible sequences of concurrent transmissions by minimizing the occupied resources. Detailed simulation results and comparison with IEEE 802.11e MAC scheme show that the proposed T-MAC can effectively improve quality of service (QoS) for multimedia traffic in terms of throughput, end-to-end delay and packet loss rate, which also manifests that T-MAC is an efficient multimedia applications transmission scheme for mobile terminals and MAPs in cognitive WMNs.     

A mobility management scheme for wireless mesh networks based on a hybrid routing protocol

Recent advances in wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have overcome the drawbacks of traditional wired networks and wireless ad hoc networks. WMNs will play a leading role in the next generation of networks, and the question of how to provide seamless mobility management for WMNs is the driving force behind the research. The inherent characteristics of WMNs, such as relatively static backbones and highly mobile clients, require new mobility management solutions to be designed and implemented.In this paper, a hybrid routing protocol for forwarding packets is proposed: this involves both link layer routing and network layer routing. Based on the hybrid routing protocol, a mobility management scheme for WMNs is presented. Both intra-domain and inter-domain mobility management have been designed to support seamless roaming in WiFi-based WMNs. During intra-domain handoff, gratuitous ARP messages are used to provide new routing information, thus avoiding re-routing and location update. For inter-domain handoff, redundant tunnels are removed in order to minimize forwarding latency. Comprehensive simulation results illustrate that our scheme has low packet latency, low packet loss ratio and short handoff latency. As a result, real-time applications over 802.11 WMNs such as VoIP can be supported.