Tuning IEEE 802.11e for wireless mesh networks

Abstract

The IEEE 802.11e standard is mostly concerned with traffic differentiation in single-hop infrastructured wireless networks. Wireless mesh networks use several wireless hops in order to forward packets to their destination. A significant issue is that the standard does not map network characteristics into the access protocol parameters it provides. This article investigates different configurations of the IEEE 802.11e access parameters in wireless mesh networks and proposes two configuration settings. Both proposals provide voice traffic service guarantee without significantly degrading the performance of other multimedia traffic classes, as demonstrated by simulation experiment results.