Tolerating Packet Losses in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) provide a promising foundation for a flexible and reliable communication infrastructure in industrial environments. Meeting the QoS demands of real-time applications, though, requires the deployment of various advanced mechanisms. Compared to wired networks, applications face higher packet loss rates in wireless networks due to the inherent unreliability of wireless communication. Furthermore, if mobile stations are involved, links that fail due to node movement frequently cause packet losses. In this paper, we present an approach to tolerate those specific losses by locally recovering lost packets and transiently re-routing them over an alternative path. The evaluation in real-world experiments shows that we can completely prevent packet loss without significantly increasing the end-to-end latency. This allows the deployment of WMNs for real-time applications without explicitly considering the increased error-proneness of wireless communication and station mobility.

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