A Cluster-Based Middleware for Infrastructure Wireless Mesh Networks

Recently, Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have appeared as a promising technology, with many potential applications, for next-generation access networks and they are hence actively researched and developed. WMNs aim to overcome the limitations of ad hoc networks and wireless local area networks (WLANs). To this end, many research efforts should be done in all protocol layers. In this article, we address the application layer by presenting a novel cluster-based middleware. We provide a detailed design and implementation of the clustering algorithms along with a comparative study. The experiments show that the proposed middleware solution significantly reduces the bandwidth usage of distributed application protocols inside the wireless mesh backbone. We also address the integration of an existing distributed application on top of the proposed cluster-based framework.