Tier-based proactive path selection mode for wireless mesh networks

In the draft of the IEEE 802.11s standard, a tree topology is established by the proactive tree-building mode of the Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol (HWMP). It is used for cases in which the root station (e.g., gateway) is an end point of the majority of the data connections. In the tree topology, the root or central stations (e.g., parent stations) are connected to the other stations (e.g., leaves) that are one level lower than the central station. Such mesh stations are likely to suffer heavily from contention in bottleneck links when the network has a high traffic load. Moreover, the dependence of the network on such stations is a point of vulnerability. A failure of the central station (e.g., a crash or simply going into sleep mode to save energy) can cripple the whole network in the tree topology. This causes performance degradation for end-to-end transmissions. In a connected mesh topology where the stations having two or more radio links between them are connected in such a way that if a failure subsists in any of the links, the other link could provide the redundancy to the network. We propose a scheme to utilize this characteristic by organizing the network into concentric tiers around the root mesh station. The tier structure facilitates path recovery and congestion control. The resulting mode is referred to as Tier-based Proactive Path Selection Mode (TPPSM). The performance of TPPSM is compared with the proactive tree mode of HWMP. Simulation results show that TPPSM has better performance.