ABSTRACT
The last decade has shown a phenomenal growth in wireless communication technologies. At the same time, Internet-like multimedia applications are becoming more and more attractive to mobile users. Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) currently appear to be a promising evolution of traditional wireless communications, and recent research efforts addressed the main challenges posed by WMNs. For instance, new routing, autoconfiguration, and self-healing strategies have been proposed. However, limited bandwidth, scarcity of wireless channels, and multihop connections coupled with a highly dynamic topology pose a severe challenge to the quality and interactivity levels of multimedia communications. This chapter will first analyze the quality of service (QoS) requirements of multimedia communications, and how mesh network environments are challenging from the multimedia delivery perspective. Then recent advances at the transport level will be summarized, focusing on the most important proposals aimed at maximizing the quality experienced by the user. In particular, protocols will be evaluated with respect to the QoS guarantees that they can provide for multimedia applications. Finally, we will analyze the architectural requirements that are necessary to deploy successful innovative multimedia services in wireless mesh scenarios. While analyzing current solutions and proposals, particular attention will be given to open problems and challenges.
