Association Discovery Protocol for Hybrid Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) consist of two kinds of nodes: mesh routers which form the backbones of WMNs and mesh clients which associate with mesh routers to access networks. Because of the discrepancy between mesh routers and mesh clients, WMNs have a hybrid structure. Their hybrid structure presents an opportunity to integrate WMNs with different networks such as wireless LAN, Bluetooth and sensor networks through bridging functions in mesh routers. Because of the ability to integrate various networks, WMNs are a potential candidate for ubiquitous networks. Organizing the WMNs to integrate heterogeneous networks requires two level of routing: routing tables for backbones between mesh routers, and association tables for linking mesh clients to mesh routers. In order to organize routing tables containing the computerd paths between mesh routers, mesh routers execute mesh routing protocols. However, the information in these routing tables is insufficient to find paths between mesh clients because they do not execute routing protocols. Hence, to complement routing tables, we store information about mesh clients in ``association tables'' indicating which mesh client is reachable by which router. To organize the association tables for all mesh clients, mesh routers should run an additional protocol. The association discovery protocol (ADP) that we propose operates efficiently. The proposed ADP focuses on decreasing control overhead without prolonging the delay to distribute association information to the entire network. The proposed ADP is evaluated by an analytical model and simulations