Heterogeneous Mesh Router with Mesh Connectivity Layer on IXP425

In this paper, we propose an efficient design of a heterogeneous mesh router, using network processors. Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is a multi-hop wireless network, comprising two kinds of nodes-mesh routers and mesh clients. Microsoft Research has developed Mesh Connectivity Layer (MCL) for computers that use Windows operating systems. In MCL routing is done using a protocol called Link Quality Source Routing (LQSR), which is a Microsoft adaptation of the Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol. LQSR is optimized for mesh scenarios. We propose an efficient method to increase the performance of the overall network by extending the MCL to network processors (IXP425) and making the network processors act as routers/gateways, connecting heterogeneous networks. The network processor with its inherent support for network processing tasks helps in realizing a significant improvement in the performance of the network.