Practical service provisioning for wireless meshes

Community wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are increasingly being deployed for providing cheap, low maintenance Internet access. For the successful adoption of WMNs as a last-mile technology, we argue that a guarantee of per-client fairness is critical. Specifically, WMNs should support a "bitrate-for-bucks" service model similar to other popular access technologies such as Cable/DSL. We analyze the effectiveness of both off-the-shelf and theoretically optimal approaches towards providing such a service. We propose the APOLLO system that outperforms both these approaches. APOLLO seamlessly integrates three synergistic components: theory-guided service planning and subscription, rate-based admission control to enforce the planned service, and a novel distributed light-weight fair scheduling scheme to deliver the admitted traffic. We evaluate APOLLO using simulations and testbed experiments.