Mobility-aware reassociation control in wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

In Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs), Mesh Access Points (MAPs) forward the packets from their associated mobile stations (STAs) to other stations or to the portal through a wireless multi-hop backhaul. The wireless backhaul has limited bandwidth and may become the bottleneck of the WMN easily when network load is heavy. Inspired by the fact that transmission from MAPs with good backhaul condition consumes less backhaul network resource, we propose a Mobility-Aware ReAssociation (MARA) control scheme that makes better use of the network resource by prolonging mobile stations association period with good backhaul MAPs. In MARA, STAs adjust their scan intervals and make association decisions based on the estimated moving directions and the association cost of nearby MAPs. Our simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves improved end-to-end performance consistently under different network scenarios. © 2013 IEEE.