A novel scheme for seamless hand-off in Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

User roaming is an important requirement in the design and deployment of a wireless mesh network which recently has emerged as a promising broadband access technology. A mobile user must be able to move out of its current mesh router's coverage and associate with a new one without any negative impact on its on-going applications. Minimizing hand- off time is just a necessary condition to support that capability. The fact is that although communication connectivity can be perceptually uninterrupted during hand-off process, its throughput can be significantly degraded afterwards due to the low available bandwidth of the new mesh router. In this paper, we propose a complete mobility management scheme for wireless mesh network to perform not only seamless hand-off for transparent communications but also bandwidth awareness for stable performances of applications after the hand-off process. The experimental results show that our proposal can minimize the hand-off latency and cut the packet loss in hand-off time to zero at an acceptable cost of memory usage. Furthermore, simulation results show that mesh client is able to maintain its current rate after roaming by choosing a right new master for its joining.