Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol

About: Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 152 publications have been published within this topic receiving 9929 citations.

Routing in multi-radio, multi-hop wireless mesh networks

Abstract: We present a new metric for routing in multi-radio, multi-hop wireless networks. We focus on wireless networks with stationary nodes, such as community wireless networks.The goal of the metric is to choose a high-throughput path between a source and a destination. Our metric assigns weights to individual links based on the Expected Transmission Time (ETT) of a packet over the link. The ETT is a function of the loss rate and the bandwidth of the link. The individual link weights are combined into a path metric called Weighted Cumulative ETT (WCETT) that explicitly accounts for the interference among links that use the same channel. The WCETT metric is incorporated into a routing protocol that we call Multi-Radio Link-Quality Source Routing.We studied the performance of our metric by implementing it in a wireless testbed consisting of 23 nodes, each equipped with two 802.11 wireless cards. We find that in a multi-radio environment, our metric significantly outperforms previously-proposed routing metrics by making judicious use of the second radio.

Architecture and algorithms for an IEEE 802.11-based multi-channel wireless mesh network

Abstract: Even though multiple non-overlapped channels exist in the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz spectrum, most IEEE 802.11-based multi-hop ad hoc networks today use only a single channel. As a result, these networks rarely can fully exploit the aggregate bandwidth available in the radio spectrum provisioned by the standards. This prevents them from being used as an ISP's wireless last-mile access network or as a wireless enterprise backbone network. In this paper, we propose a multi-channel wireless mesh network (WMN) architecture (called Hyacinth) that equips each mesh network node with multiple 802.11 network interface cards (NICs). The central design issues of this multi-channel WMN architecture are channel assignment and routing. We show that intelligent channel assignment is critical to Hyacinth's performance, present distributed algorithms that utilize only local traffic load information to dynamically assign channels and to route packets, and compare their performance against a centralized algorithm that performs the same functions. Through an extensive simulation study, we show that even with just 2 NICs on each node, it is possible to improve the network throughput by a factor of 6 to 7 when compared with the conventional single-channel ad hoc network architecture. We also describe and evaluate a 9-node Hyacinth prototype that Is built using commodity PCs each equipped with two 802.11a NICs.

IEEE 802.11s wireless mesh networks: Framework and challenges

Abstract: Wireless mesh networking based on 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN) has been actively explored for a few years. To improve the performance of WLAN mesh networks, a few new communication protocols have been developed in recent years. However, these solutions are usually proprietary and prevent WLAN mesh networks from interworking with each other. Thus, a standard becomes indispensable for WLAN mesh networks. To meet this need, an IEEE 802.11 task group, i.e., 802.11s, is specifying a standard for WLAN mesh networks. Although several standard drafts have been released by 802.11s, many issues still remain to be resolved. In order to understand what performance can be expected from the existing framework of 802.11s standard and what functionalities shall be added to 802.11s standard to improve performance, a detailed study on the existing 802.11s standard is given in this paper. The existing framework of 802.11s standard is first presented, followed by pointing out the challenging research issues that still exist in the current 802.11 standard. The purpose of this paper is to motivate other researchers to develop new scalable protocols for 802.11 wireless mesh networks.

Proposed routing for IEEE 802.11s WLAN mesh networks

Abstract: This paper describes the proposed routing for IEEE 802.11s WLAN mesh networks based on the current draft standard D0.01 from March 2006. IEEE 802.11s defines a new mesh data frame format and an extensibility framework for routing. The default routing protocol HWMP is described. HWMP is based on AODV and has a configurable extension for proactive routing towards so-called mesh portals. It uses MAC addresses (layer 2 routing) and uses a radio-aware routing metric for the calculation of paths. Furthermore, the optional routing protocol RA-OLSR is described.Note, that the standardization of WLAN Mesh Networking in IEEE 802.11s is work in progress during the time of writing. While the general concepts of the proposed routing protocols seem to be quite fixed, the details are likely to change.