Design and analysis of a hybrid mobility management scheme for wireless mesh network to handle highly mobile mesh clients

Abstract

Nowadays, the importance of continuous connectivity of wireless network has increased because of increase in the number of applications in handheld devices. For offering continuous connectivity, seamless mobility management is very much necessary. Many mobility management schemes have been proposed. The techniques can broadly classified as, tunnel based scheme and routing based scheme. The tunnel based techniques has the advantage of limited route management packet transmission. But disadvantage is that besides source and destination addresses each of the data packets carry an extra header for routing. In case of routing based scheme, advantage is that the data packets do not carry any extra header for routing. But the disadvantage is that during handoff lots of route management packets are transmitted. As the mesh client speed increases, these problems further increase. Hybrid mobility management technique has been proposed in this paper for minimizing the problems of both tunnel based scheme and routing based scheme. It has been designed to handle highly mobile mesh clients. The proposed scheme routes internet packets using routing table entries. On the other hand, it uses tunneling to route the intranet packets to the destination. The hybrid scheme and some of the existing schemes have been analyzed and compared. Performance comparison shows that the hybrid scheme outperforms these techniques.