Supporting Real-time Communication in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks are a key technology for providing wireless broadband access to communities and rural development areas, as they do not require any expensive wired backbone. They offer increased network resilience to network failures due to self-organization and redundancy in the network. But the noisy and erroneous wireless communication channel affects the quality of real-time communication. Userreceived transmission quality may become unacceptable due to artefacts, stumbles, interruptions etc. We propose a new architecture that exploits path diversity and multi-stream coding to cope with link quality variations and to reduce the effects of the wireless medium. Moreover, the architecture dynamically adapts to changes in the network.