Enhanced Mobility Management in Wireless Mesh Networks

Despite considerable efforts, mobility management in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) remains an open issue. Several high performance solutions can be found in the literature, however, they all have the same requirement that refrains them from being widely adopted: they need either modifications or additional modules into the protocol stack of users’ equipment. In this paper, we investigate the mobility problem in WMNs and propose a new efficient solution, which does not rely on any modification or additional software on the client side, thus being totally transparent for end-users. In our analysis, we first show the measurements performed on the existing WMN deployed in LIP6, namely MeshDVNet, and highlight the reasons of its poor performance. Then, we describe the design of Enhanced Mobility Management (EMM), our proposal, which does not need any supplementary installation. EMM takes advantage of the existing Neighbor Discovery Protocol (NDP) cache to keep a track of the last client association and uses this information to trigger an update in order to re-route packets. The measurements we performed show how EMM is able to greatly improve performances.