Performance Analysis of Hybrid Infrastructure Mesh/Relay Networks of IEEE 802.16 with IEEE 802.11 WLANs for Multimedia Communications

摘要

WLANs with wired infrastructure have been popularly used and widely deployed. However, due to the high cost of construction and maintenance of the infrastructure, researchers and engineers have concentrated their efforts on developing wireless mesh networks with low cost and high scalability. Currently-deployed commercial mesh networks in industry have used the IEEE 802.11 technology. However, the technology cannot provide stable services for many simultaneous users because the contention-based MAC protocol of IEEE 802.11 does not provide any QoS guarantee. Therefore, IEEE 802.11-based mesh networks are not suitable for multimedia communications, for which demand has recently increased. We propose the architecture of hybrid infrastructure mesh/relay networks of IEEE 802.16 with IEEE 802.11 WLANs using IP bridging with QoS support to overcome the problems of IEEE 802.11-based mesh networks. By simulating and comparing two mesh architectures using the OPNET Modeler, we show that the proposed architecture provides excellent QoS support.