On-demand channel reservation scheme for common traffic in wireless mesh networks

Abstract

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have recently gained momentum as a new broadband internet access technology to provide internet traffic. These networks have unique characteristics that make them different from ad hoc networks. These differences are as follows. First, WMNs are composed of static mesh routers that are equipped with multiple radio interfaces and turn each interface into a non-overlapping channel. These additional interfaces can create multiple concurrent links between adjacent nodes. Second, most of the traffic in WMNs is directed towards the gateway. Third, both local traffic and internet traffic are relayed by the mesh router to indeed destination. The Multi-Radio Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV-MR) developed to support multi-radio and does not take into account above-mentioned WMNs characteristics. In this paper, we propose an on-demand channel reservation scheme to reserve some of mesh router radio interfaces to support the gateway traffic while the remaining interfaces can be used to support the local traffic. Our scheme establishes high throughput paths for the traffic destined at the gateway, reduces the intra-flow and inter-flow interferences as well as to support full duplex node transmission.The scheme allows the gateway to assign a list of channels for each received gateway routing discovery message. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme significantly improves the performance of multi-radio multi-channel wireless mesh networks.