Inter-Gateway Cross-Layer Handoffs in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have recently emerged to be a cost-effective solution to support large-scale wireless Internet access. One important component of realizing large-scale WMNs is mobility management. Although a considerable amount of research on handoff management for cellular and Mobile IP networks has been proposed, handoff management for IP-based WMNs remains largely unexplored. Conventional handoff mechanisms can cause significant performance degradation when directly applied to WMNs due to overlooking the key features of WMNs. They also do not address the special design challenges in WMNs. In this paper, a new architectural design is proposed to facilitate inter-gateway handoffs in WMNs. The proposed Planned Multicast Group (PMG)-based architecture can facilitate cross-layer handoffs and hence reduce the total handoff delay caused from multiple layers. Extensive simulations are conducted to evaluate the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed PMG approach. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed PMG-based cross-layer handoff scheme outperforms the conventional WMN handoff schemes and is suitable for realtime multimedia applications in WMNs.