An Efficient Multi-hop ARP Scheme for Wireless LAN based Mesh Networks

One of the important functions of wireless mesh networks is multi-hop packet forwarding among fixed wireless routers. The current proposal for the IEEE 802.11s specification (i.e., the standardization effort for WLAN-based mesh networks) focuses on adding such mesh functionality into wireless LAN devices in the MAC layer (L2). Here, a route discovery process for a destination will be based on its MAC address to find a multi-hop path towards the destination. Clearly, in order to achieve the destination´s MAC address before route discovery ARP request/reply packets will be delivered in a multi-hop fashion. This may cause significant bandwidth consumption due to uncontrolled ARP flooding. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-bop ARP scheme (MARP) for more efficient MAC address resolution in WLAN-based mesh networks. Two different approaches are presented; one for utilizing a proxy ARP when there is a root portal available, and the other for integrating route discovery information into ARP request/reply frames (for on-demand route establishment) when there is no root portal available. The preliminary simulation results show that our proposed MARP reduces the end-to-end latency as well as the control packet overhead