Architectural and mobility management designs in internet-based infrastructure wireless mesh networks

1 online resource (152 pages) : PDF

2011

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have recently emerged to be a cost-effective solution to support large-scale wireless Internet access. They have numerous applications, such as broadband Internet access, building automation, and intelligent transportation systems. One research challenge for Internet-based WMNs is to design efficient mobility management techniques for mobile users to achieve seamless roaming. Mobility management includes handoff management and location management. The objective of this research is to design new handoff and location management techniques for Internet-based infrastructure WMNs.Handoff management enables a wireless network to maintain active connections as mobile users move into new service areas. Previous solutions on handoff management in infrastructure WMNs mainly focus on intra-gateway mobility. New handoff issues involved in inter-gateway mobility in WMNs have not been properly addressed. Hence, a new architectural design is proposed to facilitate inter-gateway handoff management in infrastructure WMNs. The proposed architecture is designed to specifically address the special handoff design challenges in Internet-based WMNs. It can facilitate parallel executions of handoffs from multiple layers, in conjunction with a data caching mechanism which guarantees minimum packet loss during handoffs. Based on the proposed architecture, a Quality of Service (QoS) handoff mechanism is also proposed to achieve QoS requirements for both handoff and existing traffic before and after handoffs in the inter-gateway WMN environment.Location management in wireless networks serves the purpose of tracking mobile users and locating them prior to establishing new communications. Existing location management solutions proposed for single-hop wireless networks cannot be directly applied to Internet-based WMNs. Hence, a dynamic location management framework in Internet-based WMNs is proposed that can guarantee the location management performance and also minimize the protocol overhead. In addition, a novel resilient location area design in Internet-based WMNs is also proposed. The formation of the location areas can adapt to the changes of both paging load and service load so that the tradeoff between paging overhead and mobile device power consumption can be balanced, and at the same time, the required QoS performance of existing traffic is maintained. Therefore, together with the proposed handoff management design, efficient mobility management can be realized in Internet-based infrastructure WMNs.

doctoral dissertations

Engineering
Communication

Ph.D.

Handoff Management
Location Management
OPNET
QoS
Wireless Mesh Network

Electrical Engineering

Xie, Jiang

Dahlberg, Teresa
Howitt, Ivan
Nasipuri, Asis
Wang, Yu

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 2011.

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Zhao_uncc_0694D_10261

http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.13093/etd:1279