On Redundant Multipath Operating System Support for Wireless Mesh Networks

Low-cost wireless routers are changing the way people connect to the Internet. They are also very cheap, albeit quite limited, Linux boxes. These attributes make them ideal candidates for wireless mesh routers. This paper presents a minimally invasive mechanism for redundant multipath routing in kernel-space to achieve high reliability with high throughput in a mesh network. This service is essential for achieving fast, lossless handoff as mobile devices roam throughout the wireless mesh coverage area. However, redundant multipath is not natively supported by current operating systems, limiting the routing mechanisms that can be used in these networks to user-level implementations, which can greatly degrade performance. We show an architecture that integrates this mechanism in a wireless mesh system, resulting in a high-throughput 802.11 mesh network with fast handoff over low-cost routers.