An IEEE 802.21-based Approach to Integrate Unidirectional Wireless Technologies into QoS-constrained Broadband Wireless Mesh Access Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) research has matured in recent years and implementations are being tested around the world. In a WMN, participating nodes are automatically configured allowing them to communicate among their peers via multiple hops when no direct physical connectivity exists. This allows community networks such as Freifunk[5] to provide affordable Internet access to their communities by sharing a few gateway nodes. Increasing demand for multi-media content poses a challenge for the typical WMN routing protocols such as Optimised Link State Routing (OLSR) which lack Quality of Service (QoS) support. Although, numerous solutions have been proposed to introduce QoS awareness, those WMNs fail to meet commercial operator requirements in term of reliability and QoS guarantees. In this paper we propose a novel IEEE 802.21-based approach seamlessly integrating broadcast technologies such as Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) into a heterogeneous multi-radio WMN architecture in order to provide support for high-bandwidth multi-media services.