Proposal for a Wireless Mesh Network that realizes seamless handover and its simulation results

Wireless mesh networks have an advantage of building backbone infrastructure easily, where access points, which have been conventionally connected by wired LANs, are connected by an ad-hoc network using wireless LANs. However, the wireless mesh network still has various problems such as the realization of a seamless handover, the securing of a communication bandwidth, and the selection of the most suitable routing protocol. WAPL (wireless access point link) which we propose in this paper can solve all these problems. Namely, WAPL enables a constant seamless handover. It does not give much influence on the traffic. It can also select ad-hoc routing protocols freely. To realize a seamless handover, WAPL is aware of communication routes all the time and sends an advertising message that reports its handover in a unicast mode. To reduce the traffic of control messages, it generates mapping information, which is the relation between access points and terminals on demand. In WAPL, the function generating mapping information is completely independent of an ad-hoc routing protocol. In this paper, we implemented WAPL in network simulator ns-2, and compared it with the existing methods. We succeeded in showing the features of WAPL quantitatively.