TITLE: Channel Time Allocations and Handoff Management for Fair Throughput in Wireless Mesh Networks

ii This thesis is dedicated to my beloved parents, husband and friends. Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have been widely deployed for various applications. In contrast to a pure ad hoc network, a WMN having an infrastructure formed by fixed access points (APs) can provide relatively reliable transmissions for forwarding data to and from mobile stations (MSs). The fixed infrastructure also provides chances for effectively supporting various services, better utilizing the radio resources, and improving other network performance. On the other hand, in a WMN with a large number of APs and MSs, maintaining the service fairness among the MSs located in different geographical areas and having different mobility patterns can be difficult. In this thesis, we study how to provide fair throughput for MSs in a WMN by joint channel time allocations and handoff management, where the channel time is allocated at two levels, one among the APs, and another among the MSs associated to the same AP