Project Summary

Wireless mesh networks were originally proposed for connecting WLANs in residential or metropolitan areas to provide pervasive wireless access and share Internet connections. In the future, mesh networks will surely go far beyond the above application scenarios. This project aims to push mesh networks into the arena of real-time applications. Supporting real-time data delivery in wireless mesh networks is much more difficult than its counterpart in the wired networks due to resource constraints, shared wireless channels, lossy communication, and highly dynamic traffic. It requires system support from the bottom all the way to the top of the network protocol stack. The objective of this project is to develop new technologies at the MAC and network layers to support end-to-end, real-time data transport in wireless mesh networks. The research includes 1) real-time MAC protocols with bounded media access delay and minimized channel idle time, 2) queuing management for multiple service classes and distributed admission control of real-time traffic, and 3) end-to-end fairness, bandwidth assurance, quality-of-service (QoS) routing for real-time flows. The research results are expected to have significant intellectual and practical impact. Not only will the new technologies provide solutions to an array of fundamental problems in real-time mesh networks, but also they will expand the application scope of mesh networks from access networks to distributed real-time systems in diverse domains such as transportation, battlefield surveillance/command/control, and wireless multimedia communications.

Funding Agency: National Science Foundation

http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=0721731

PI: Dr. Shigang Chen

Project Duration: 09/01/2007 - 08/31/2009

Publication

1. Ying Jian, Shigang Chen, Liang Zhang, Yuguang Fang, New Adaptive Protocols for Fine-Level End-to-End Rate Control in Wireless Networks, in Proc. of 16th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP'08), Orlando, Florida, USA, October 2008.

2. Ming Zhang, Ying Jian, Liang Zhang, Shigang Chen, Idle-Slot Recycling in a Collision-Free Real-Time MAC Protocol, in Proc. of IEEE Globecom, Ad Hoc, Sensor and Mesh Networking Symposium (GC'08 AHSN), New Orleans, LA, USA, November/December 2008.

3. Liang Zhang, Shigang Chen, Ying Jian, Ming Zhang, A Novel Solution for End-to-End Fairness Problem in Wireless Mesh Networks, in Proc. of IEEE Globecom, Ad Hoc, Sensor and Mesh Networking Symposium (GC'08 AHSN), New Orleans, LA, USA, November/December 2008.

4. Ying Jian, Shigang Chen, Can CSMA/CA Networks be Made Fair?, in Proc. of ACM MobiCom, San Francisco, California, USA, September 2008.

5. Liang Zhang, Shigang Chen, Ying Jian, Achieving Global End-to-End Maxmin in Multihop Wireless Networks, in Proc. of 28th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS'08), Beijing, China, June 2008.