Location-Aware Chord-Based Overlay for Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have been widely set up for last-mile network connectivity due to their flexibility, ease of use, and low-cost deployment. When used in conjunction with peer-to-peer data transfer solutions, many innovative applications and services, such as distributed storage, distributed resource sharing, and live TV broadcasting, can be deployed with no centralized administration. However, to achieve good quality of service in wireless environments, it is important that the associated peer-to-peer overlay is not only aware of the availability but of the location of its peers and services as well. This paper proposes a wireless location-aware Chord-based overlay mechanism for WMNs (WILCO) based on a novel geographical multilevel identification (ID) mapping and an improved finger table. The proposed scheme exploits the location information of mesh routers (MRs) to decrease the number of hops that the overlay messages traverse in the physical topology. In comparison with the original Chord, the WILCO mechanism has significant benefits: It reduces the number of lookup messages, has symmetric lookup on keys in both the forward and backward directions of a Chord ring, and achieves a stretch factor of O(1). Simulation results show how the proposed scheme outperforms the original Chord and the state-of-the-art MeshChord in terms of lookup efficiency and how it significantly reduces the overlay message overhead.