QoS in distributed wireless 802.11-based multi-hop networks

Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN)s are today common for access to Internet; well-known and used is IEEE 802.11 standardized technology. Some drawbacks of the standardized distributed medium access scheme, Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) has resulted in considerations made to extend the DCF from single-hop communications to multi-hop. Multihopping has the potential to reduce energy consumption and increase throughput and coverage. The drawback is lack of Quality-of-Service (QoS) support, which already with single-hop communication was bad, but extending a communication between two peers to multi-hop significantly reduces the possibility to offer reliable transmissions. The contention-based medium access performed at each hop with the DCF results in large uncertainties as to when a packet arrives to its end-destination. There are two general approaches for extending the DCF with QoS functionality: 1. Allocate resources for a flow and 2. Assign a flow higher priority than other flows. My hypothesis is that for strict QoS guarantees, a reservation-based approach is the better one. This has been my motivation to design a new medium access protocol; based on the DCF, periodic time slots for QoS-demanding real-time applications are reserved. The Distributed Allocation of time slots for Real-time traffic (DARE) is unique as it totally distributed sets up an end-to-end reservation before the transmission of data begins, repairs broken reservations, support many periods and time slot sizes and distribute piggy-backed information even to a two-hop radius from a receiver. This thesis describes the DARE protocol and also presents results from comparisons of DARE, DCF and the IEEE 802.11 E standardized priority-based QoS medium access protocol Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA). Using simulations, this thesis shows that DARE offers constant end-to-end packet delay for a flow, very low average packet delay in the whole system and constant throughput. EDCA and DCF depend strongly on the total network load; average packet delay for a real-time flow increases rapidly with the surrounding load. DARE outperforms both DCF and EDCA when many flows are present, even in networks with frequent topology changes where reservations must be repaired. Thus, the reservation-based DARE protocol is the most suitable approach for extending DCF with QoS.