A multimedia-based fuzzy queue-aware routing approach for wireless mesh networks

Abstract: The proliferation of multimedia content and Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are changing the Internet facilities and life style of fixed and mobile users. For the success of the next generation wireless networks, novel multimedia approaches with quality level assurance are required to allow the distribution of video-streaming, video conference, gaming, multimedia social networking, green multimedia content and other entrainment applications for thousand of users in ubiquitous wireless (mesh) systems. In this context, new routing schemes are needed to provide end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) support for delay/loss/jitter-sensitive multimedia applications in WMNs. The well-known OLSR (Optimized Link State Routing) protocol with ETX (Expected Transmission Count) metric bring many benefits for the path selection process, but present a drawback in the queue availability management and reduce the system performance. Therefore, multimedia-related packets will suffer with loss/delay/jitter and the system overall performance will decrease. This paper proposes the Queue-based OLSR ETX (QoETX) approach to overcome the limitations of OLSR-ETX regarding queue availability by using a cross-layer scheme and supporting QoS and QoE assurance. QoETX optimizes network and user-based parameters by coordinating queue availability, QoS and fuzzy issues in the routing decision process as a way to allocate the best paths for multimedia applications. In order to present the benefits of the proposed solution compared with existing routing schemes, namely OLSR-ETX, OLSR-FLC, OLSR-MD and HWMP (IEEE 802.11s standard), regarding QoS (block probability and throughput) and QoE (PSNR, SSIM, VQM and MOS) parameters, performance evaluations were carried by using the Network Simulator (NS-2.34).