Wireless Mesh Networks Research Research Articles

A survey of cross‐layer protocols for IEEE 802.11 wireless multi‐hop mesh networks

SummaryThere has been an escalation in deployment and research of wireless mesh networks by both the business community and academia in the last few years. Their attractive characteristics include low deployment cost, a low‐cost option to extend network coverage and ease of maintenance due to their self‐healing properties. Multiple routes exist between the sender and receiver nodes because of the mesh layout that ensures network connectivity even when node or link failures occur. Recent advances among others include routing metrics, optimum routing, security, scheduling, cross‐layer designs and physical layer techniques. However, there are still challenges in wireless mesh networks as discussed in this paper that need to be addressed. Cross‐layer design allows information from adjacent and non‐adjacent layers to be used at a particular layer for performance improvement. This paper presents a survey of cross‐layer protocol design approaches applied to the IEEE 802.11 standards for wireless multi‐hop mesh networks that have been proposed over the last few years for improved performance. We summarize the current research efforts in cross‐layer protocol design using the IEEE 802.11 standard in identifying unsolved issues that are a promising avenue to further research. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

MDSDV: a modified DSDV routing mechanism for wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs), which are consisted of mesh routers and mesh clients, have emerged as a key technology for next-generation wireless networking. WMNs integrate the advantages of wireless local area networks (WLAN) and ad hoc networks and more and more researches have focused on it. In WMNs' routing mechanisms can significantly affect WMNs' performance and optimal routing mechanisms are imperative to gain the potential advantages of WMNs. In research of WMNs' routing mechanisms, previous work mostly focuses on modifying the existing ad hoc routing mechanisms while this paper focuses on modifying destination-sequenced distance-vector routing mechanism (DSDV) with cross-layer design method and proposes the modified destination-sequenced distance-vector routing mechanism (MDSDV) for WMNs. Different from DSDV, the proposed MDSDV uses the integrated effects of bandwidth and hop count as the routing metric for selecting appropriate routes. Moreover, this paper simulates the proposed MDSDV in the network simulator-2 (NS2) comparing with previous DSDV and the ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) routing. The simulation results show that the proposed MDSDV can preferably fit the specific characteristics of WMNs and it is the relative best choice for WMNs which consist of a large number of nodes and need high packet delivery rate, low end-to-end delay and insensitive routing overhead.

Trends, Advances, and Challenges in Testbed-based Wireless Mesh Network Research

Wireless mesh networks are in the focus of research for more than a decade. After a short simulation based research period, several testbeds have been set up for the study of particular research to...

Advances in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks facilitate the extension of wireless local area networks into wide areas and have emerged as a promising approach for future network accesses. Prior efforts on wireless networks, especially multi-hop ad hoc networks, have led to significant research contributions that range from fundamental results on theoretical capacity bounds to numerous practical routing and transport protocols. Unlike ad hoc networks, however, mesh networks can serve as access networks that employ multi-hop wireless forwarding by fixed mesh nodes to relay traffic to and from the wired Internet. The unique features of wireless mesh networks pose challenges in designing affordable, reliable, and sustainable network infrastructures. The critical issues span a rich spectrum of issues from interference-aware channel assignment, multi-hop routing, to reliable transport and infrastructure optimization, many of which have to be revisited in this new context. The purpose of this special issue is to archive the stateof-the-art achievements in wireless mesh networking. We received 30 original and unpublished research papers in both theoretical studies and practical protocol/architecture designs for wireless mesh networks, as well as prototypes. All these papers have gone through a strict peer review process, and among them, 14 high quality papers were selected, which offer a broad and updated coverage of wireless mesh network research and development. In addition, two high-quality papers selected from The Third International Wireless Internet Conference (WICON’2007) are included in this special issue as well. The first two papers of the special issue deal with quality of service (QoS) issue in wireless mesh networks. The paper “Provisioning of Parameterized Quality of Service in 802.11e Based Wireless Mesh Networks,” by Xiaowen Chu, presents a framework for the provisioning of parameterized QoS in 802.11e based wireless mesh networks. By enforcing admission control algorithms and scheduling algorithms, this framework can support constant bit-rate (CBR) and variable bit-rate (VBR) traffic flows. Deterministic endto-end delay bounds for CBR traffic flows and VBR traffic flows that conform to leaky-bucket regulators have been derived. For VBR traffic flows without leaky-bucket regulators, a dynamic transmission opportunity (TXOP) scheduling algorithm has been proposed which was shown to be very effective in achieving high channel utilization ratio while keeping an acceptable delay performance. The paper entitled “QoS Differentiation for IEEE 802.16 WiMax Mesh Networks,” by Yan Zhang, Honglin Hu, and HsiaoMobile Netw Appl (2008) 13:1–5 DOI 10.1007/s11036-008-0055-3