DoMaIN: A Novel Dynamic Location Management Solution for Internet-Based Infrastructure Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have been deployed in many areas. There is an increasing demand for supporting a large number of mobile users in WMNs. As one of the key components in mobility management support, location management serves the purpose of tracking mobile users and locating them prior to establishing new communications. Previous dynamic location management schemes proposed for cellular and wireless local area networks (WLANs) cannot be directly applied to WMNs due to the existence of multihop wireless links in WMNs. Moreover, new design challenges arise when applying location management for silently roaming mobile users in the mesh backbone. Considering the number of wireless hops, an important factor affecting the performance of WMNs, we propose a DoMaIN framework that can help mobile users to decide whether an intra- or intergateway location update (LU) is needed to ensure the best location management performance (i.e., packet delivery) among dynamic location management solutions. In addition, by dynamically guiding mobile users to perform LU to a desirable location entity, the proposed DoMaIN framework can minimize the location management protocol overhead in terms of LU overhead in the mesh backbone. Furthermore, DoMaIN brings extra benefits for supporting a dynamic hop-based LU triggering method that is different from previous dynamic LU triggering schemes proposed for cellular networks and WLANs. We evaluate the performance of DoMaIN in different case studies using OPNET simulations. Comprehensive simulation results demonstrate that DoMaIN outperforms other location management schemes and is a satisfactory location management solution for a large number of mobile users silently and arbitrarily roaming under the wireless mesh backbone.