Definition of an 802.11 Interface Management Process in a Proposed System for Transmission Capacity Enhancement in Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

802.11-based wireless mesh networks (WMNs) as last mile solutions frequently become bottlenecks in the overall Internet communication structure. The lack of end-to-end capacity on routes also affects vertical traffic coming from or flowing towards external networks, such as the Internet. The presented approach aims to increase the overall network performance by exploiting channel diversity and to additionally favor vertical traffic. To achieve this, first we propose a general system that modifies an existing mesh node architecture, in order to prepare a more efficient resource management and to enhance the restricted transmission capacity in standard WMNs. The parallel use of nonoverlapping channels, based on a multiradio node, marks the starting point. The system treats aspects of channel assignment, traffic analysis, and fast layer 2 forwarding. Then, the impact of a novel Multihop Radio Resource Management process is discussed as a relevant component of this new system architecture. The process combines per-hop priority queuing and load balancing in a novel way. It was designed, developed, and evaluated in the presented paper, resulting in the fact that capacity in WMNs was significantly increased, Quality-of-Service parameters were improved, and more efficient use of multiple radios could be reached. The proposed process was validated using a simulation approach.