A mobility management scheme for wireless mesh networks based on a hybrid routing protocol

Recent advances in wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have overcome the drawbacks of traditional wired networks and wireless ad hoc networks. WMNs will play a leading role in the next generation of networks, and the question of how to provide seamless mobility management for WMNs is the driving force behind the research. The inherent characteristics of WMNs, such as relatively static backbones and highly mobile clients, require new mobility management solutions to be designed and implemented.In this paper, a hybrid routing protocol for forwarding packets is proposed: this involves both link layer routing and network layer routing. Based on the hybrid routing protocol, a mobility management scheme for WMNs is presented. Both intra-domain and inter-domain mobility management have been designed to support seamless roaming in WiFi-based WMNs. During intra-domain handoff, gratuitous ARP messages are used to provide new routing information, thus avoiding re-routing and location update. For inter-domain handoff, redundant tunnels are removed in order to minimize forwarding latency. Comprehensive simulation results illustrate that our scheme has low packet latency, low packet loss ratio and short handoff latency. As a result, real-time applications over 802.11 WMNs such as VoIP can be supported.