Directional QoS Routing Framework

Abstract

To cope with the pressing need of running content-rich multimedia applications and real-time services, Quality of Service (QoS) support has become a vital component in today’s wireless networks. Using beamforming antennas in multi-hop wireless networks can potentially spare more network resources which can be utilized to provide additional QoS guarantees. However, these opportunities are still under-explored. In this chapter, we develop a framework to analyze conflicts between wireless links in the presence of contention-based directional MAC protocols. Based on a novel taxonomy, we classify the link conflicts and propose a novel colored conflict graph abstraction to model the interdependencies between wireless links. Our analytical framework can be utilized as a basis to design several interference-aware and QoS-aware schemes for contention-based multi-hop wireless networks with beamforming antennas. Based on our analysis, we formulate the bandwidth-guaranteed routing problem as an optimization problem. Since the problem is NP-hard, we present a heuristic algorithm for joint routing and admission control to find single-path bandwidth-guaranteed routes. Using extensive simulations, we demonstrate the accuracy of our conflict analysis and the ability of the proposed algorithm to provide QoS guarantees along with efficient channel utilization.