A novel service-oriented routing algorithm for wireless mesh network

Abstract

Wireless mesh network (WMN) is a promising technology that can provide cost-effective solutions to cover a rather large area. Despite this important feature, the future generation of WMNs needs to support more and more applications, such as voice over internet protocol (VoIP) and multimedia content distribution. To efficiently support these diverse demands and to effectively utilize the wireless network, service-oriented network layer design has been proposed recently. A key idea of such a service-oriented design is that a user only needs to specify the service to the network, instead of the destination address in a traditional manner. In this work, we present a simple solution, namely, the service-oriented routing algorithm (SORA), to enable service orientation in WMNs. The proposed scheme works in a similar manner as the Domain Name System (DNS). Specifically, SORA associates IP addresses to services just like the DNS associates IP addresses to domain names. To demonstrate the viability of the proposed scheme, we have developed simple but efficient programs that are running in Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) devices, in particular, workstations and wireless mesh routers. Our experiments show that the proposed algorithm can efficiently provide distributed services in wireless mesh networks.