QoS Provisioning in Wireless Mesh Networks: A Survey

With the recent developments in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN), provisioning of Quality of Service (QoS) for real time applications is considered as an important but challenging area of research. QoS support for various real time applications are implemented in different layers of the protocol stack. The diversity of such research efforts has contributed to many protocols/schemes. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on various QoS enhancement schemes reported in the literature covering various angles of research domains. Diversified QoS challenges in WMNs and their reported solutions proposed in the literature are discussed using a layered approach. While presenting the state of the art research findings in MAC and routing, a classification framework for each of the layers is proposed first. The classification frameworks provide unified approaches for categorizing different protocols based on their distinctive features and sketch their correlations. However, the proposals for leveraging TCP performance in WMN have been discussed straightaway. Further, this paper provides an insight into the pros and cons of the surveyed protocols and points out the open research challenges for the future generation networking.