Abstract
Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) cannot completely guarantee good performance of traffic sources such as video streaming. To improve the network performance, this study proposes an efficient engineering solution named Wireless-to-Ethernet-Mesh-Portal-Passageway (WEMPP) that allows effective use of wired communication in WMNs. WEMPP permits transmitting data through wired and stable paths even when the destination is in the same network as the source (Intra-traffic). Tested with four popular routing protocols (Optimized Link State Routing or OLSR as a proactive protocol, Dynamic MANET On-demand or DYMO as a reactive protocol, DYMO with spanning tree ability and HWMP), WEMPP considerably decreases the end-to-end delay, jitter, contentions and interferences on nodes, even when the network size or density varies. WEMPP is also cost-effective and increases the network throughput. Moreover, in contrast to solutions proposed by previous studies, WEMPP is easily implemented by modifying the firmware of the actual Ethernet hardware without altering the routing protocols and/or the functionality of the IP/MAC/Upper layers. In fact, there is no need for modifying the functionalities of other mesh components in order to work with WEMPPs. The results of this study show that WEMPP significantly increases the performance of all routing protocols, thus leading to better video quality on nodes.
Highlights
A Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) consists of mesh routers and nodes that communicate by means of multiple wireless links [1]
Considering that wired links offer a higher capacity than wireless links, this paper proposes the use of wired links between mesh portals for exchanging information among nodes even when they are in the same WMN
Our results indicate that WEMPP improves the performance of several routing protocols in a WMN
Summary
A Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) consists of mesh routers and nodes that communicate by means of multiple wireless links [1]. IP wired links among the mesh portals cannot be exploited for intra-traffic This restriction imposed by IP routing can only be compromised by implementing a virtual IP connection among the gateways. WEMPP is able to avoid the problems imposed by the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) [5] when two different sections (one wireless and another wired) are present in a network. As there is only one active port holding this condition, intra-mesh traffic cannot be rerouted through the wired links when STP or RSTP are executed without WEMPPs. Other functionalities are incorporated into WEMPP nodes in order to improve intra-mesh traffic. We precisely evaluate the performance of WEMPP with video traffic, one of the highly demanded traffics nowadays [6] The network considers both mesh mobile source nodes (MSNs) and STA (Stationary) nodes.
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