Abstract
Wireless mesh networking is expected to play an important role in the future Internet. It can facilitate network coverage at less expense, making it a fitting candidate for multi-hop communications in distributed wireless environments. However, Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) still suffer from many problems such as channel contention, interference, low efficiency of bandwidth utilization, etc. Therefore, guaranteeing Quality of Service (QoS) for multimedia applications while ensuring high bandwidth efficiency is a challenging task in WMNs. In this context, this thesis aims at solving these problems from a resource management at Medium Access Control (MAC) layer point of view. The thesis first surveys the existing protocol designs for Resource Reservation (RR) in IEEE 802.11-based wireless networks. It advises the necessity of MAC layer protocol design for guaranteeing the QoS for Real-Time Sessions (RTSNs) while optimizing bandwidth efficiency. Following the outcomes of the investigation, the thesis proposes an analytical framework to evaluate the guaranteed QoS performance of distributed hybrid MAC RR schemes in distributed single-hop wireless networks. After that, the thesis devises a comprehensive hybrid MAC RR scheme that consists of a distributed hybrid MAC scheduling mechanism and a distributed Admission Control (AC) algorithm. The hybrid MAC scheduling mechanism can provide contention-free channel access for RTSNs and reserve dedicated and periodic resources for them to ensure their QoS guaranteeing. In addition, the mechanism can implement concurrent transmission in the Contention-Free Period (CFP) in order to enhance the bandwidth usage for the reserved resources. The distributed Admission Control Algorithm (ACA), on the other hand, can cooperate with the distributed hybrid MAC scheduling mechanism in order to make optimized RR for RTSNs with specific QoS requirements. Furthermore, the proposed distributed ACA can help MAC scheduler to implement resource sharing. It can permit several RTSNs to share an identical Transmission Opportunity (TXOP) in the CFP provided that each of the resource sharer can obtain guaranteed QoS. This can directly improve the efficiency of bandwidth utilization.