QoS over Real-Time Wireless Multi-hop Protocol

This paper proposes a way to incorporate multimedia traffic in a real-time wireless communication network without jeopardizing the hard real-time traffic. This idea has been implemented and analyzed as an extension of the real-time multi-hop protocol (RT-WMP), a novel protocol that supports hard real-time traffic in relatively small ad-hoc networks. The protocol allows merging the real-time traffic coming from cooperative multitask robot teams and human communication such as video and voice. The quality of service (QoS) extension takes advantage of the bandwidth left free by the RT-WMP when it is not working in the worst-case situation. Real tests involving multi-robot data exchange and multimedia communication show that the extension can be perfectly integrated in the protocol and offers a suitable QoS transmission mechanism for real-time multi-hop networks.