Mobility-Aware Multi-Path Forwarding Scheme for Wireless Mesh Networks

Localized mobility management is critical to achieve low handoff delay and signaling cost. However, the existing solutions may not be suitable for emerging wireless mesh networks (WMNs), which are characterized by the direct interconnectivity between access points. To exploit this feature of WMN, in this paper, we propose a novel localized mobility management scheme, called mobility-aware multi-path (MAMP) forwarding scheme, by utilizing multi-path routing. Our scheme can significantly improve the handoff processing performance at a slightly increased cost of control and management overhead. Extensive performance evaluations demonstrate that MAMP is superior to the existing solutions in terms of handoff delay, signaling amount as well as network scalability. Moreover, the proposed scheme can also achieve a better stability and reliability by adopting multi-path packet forwarding strategy.