Multi-hop Delay Performance in Wireless Mesh Networks

Multi-hop wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have been actively developed as a flexible and reliable platform to support a wide variety of real-time and best-effort multimedia services and applications. For delay sensitive applications over multi-hop wireless connections, end-to-end delay performance is a crucial performance metric and hence the focus of this paper. We extend the link layer effective capacity (EC) model to derive a lower bound of delay-bound violation probability, or complementary cumulative distribution function over multi-hop wireless communication paths. A fluid traffic model with cross traffic and a Rayleigh fading channel with Doppler spectrum are considered in our study. End-to-end average delay and delay jitter bounds are also obtained. Analytical results are verified by extensive computer simulations under different traffic conditions.