A Study on Large-Scale Wireless Mesh Networks Cooperating with High-Speed External Networks - Improvement of Performance Deterioration Due to Increasing Network Scale

In wireless mesh networks, not only the connections from mobile terminals to access nodes but also the connections between access nodes are constructed by multi-hop wireless communication. The performance in these networks decreases as the network scale grows because the end-to-end delay and packet loss also increase. Moreover, two or more networks will unite geographically as the scale of each mesh network expands. Therefore, plural gateway nodes connected to outside networks exist in such large-scale wireless mesh networks. This paper proposes routing algorithms which construct multi-hop routes between access nodes that use outside networks collectively. The outside networks between the gateway nodes are used as bypass routes. The purpose of this scheme is to prevent the performance deterioration due to the increase of network scale. New route metrics that do not depend on the location conditions of the gateway nodes are introduced to RA-OLSR to maintain flexibility. Performance evaluations of the end-to-end delay and packet loss are shown by computer simulations.