Multi-portal association based dispatching and a virtual-queue method in wireless mesh networks

Single-portal association has long been adopted as the basic assumption in wireless mesh network (WMN) research. Whereas this assumption can simplify the overall design, it cannot meet the increasing growth of traffic volume. We propose the use of multi-portal association in this paper, which allows traffic to go through multiple mesh portals so as to ease the performance bottleneck problem caused by single-portal association. We propose the multi-portal association scheme, and a method using the virtual-queue concept to support traffic dispatching within such multi-portal association scheme. The operation of the virtual-queue method is based on the centralized link state estimation and virtual queue emulation. The simulation results show that the proposed multi-portal association outperforms the conventional single-portal association. For the UDP traffic, in the simple-structured and short-distanced networks, the use of multi-portal association (with the virtual-queue dispatching method) is able to reduce 99% of packet loss and increase 500% of throughput, when comparing to the case of using single-portal association. In the more-complex structured networks, it can provide 60% reduction in packet loss and achieve 1500% increase of throughput. On the other hand, for the TCP traffic, in the simple-structured networks, the proposed solution can achieve 92% reduction in latency and 91% increase of throughput.