ABI: A mechanism for increasing video delivery quality in multi-radio Wireless Mesh Networks with Energy Saving

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are becoming increasingly popular mostly due to their ease of deployment. One of the main drawbacks of these networks is that they suffer with respect to Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning to its clients. Equipping wireless mesh nodes with multiple radios for increasing the available bandwidth has become a common practice nowadays due to the low cost of the wireless chipsets. Even though the available bandwidth increases with each radio deployed on the mesh node, the energy consumed for transmission increases accordingly. Thus, efficient usage of the radio interfaces is a key aspect for keeping the energy consumption at low levels while keeping a high QoS level for the mesh network’s clients. In the light of the above presented aspects concerning WMNs, the contribution of this paper is two-fold: (i) ABI, a mechanism for efficient usage of the available bandwidth for the mesh nodes, and (ii) decreasing the energy consumption by activating the radios only when needed. The solution proposed is throughly evaluated and shows that the two contributions can provide good QoS and decrease the overall energy consumption.