Initial entry during deployment requires tactical networks supporting voice, video, and data requirements to be established quickly given little existing telecommunication infrastructure. Wireless mesh networks using contention-based medium access control (MAC) appear to be an easy off-the-shelf solution, but their performance is lacking for support of such diverse high-bandwidth low-latency requirements. In the 1990s, wired and optical network architects had to reconsider the inefficiencies of packet switching and consider long proven methods such as circuit-switching to reduce latency through traffic engineering to support such diverse traffic requirements. This resulted in the development of Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) and Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) technologies. Because both are mature and proven technologies for wired and optical network architectures, much research has been done to apply these methods to wireless mesh networks. But optimal performance improvement eludes wireless mesh network designers because of differences between the wired/optical and wireless environments in the provision of non-interfering unidirectional internodal links and lack of a wireless circuit switch. We propose a wireless mesh networking architecture that will provide low-latency and potentially higher throughput, based upon the availability of multiple orthogonal channels, wormhole switching supported by a physical layer circuit-switch, and a reservation protocol that will assign channels to provide non-interfering unidirectional internodal links through quality-of-service (QoS) routing, and scheduling. We will also present performance results based upon a simulation model of our proposed architecture to show how end-to-end latency is considerably reduced compared to 802.11-based wireless mesh networks.
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