Congestion-Aware Clique-Based Handoff in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have attracted increasing attention from the research community as a high-performance and low-cost solution to last-mile broadband Internet access. However, it remains an open challenge to provide mesh clients with efficient handoff among different mesh routers. In this paper, we address channel switching efficiency and load balancing capability during the handoff process. More specifically, (1) we introduce the concept of clique into WMNs to handle channel conflicts among neighboring mesh routers and thus achieve scalability; and (2) we propose a dynamic load balancing strategy for the handoff process, which integrates the mechanisms of mesh router selection and traffic admission control. Simulation results show that our proposed approach achieves significant gain in the handoff delay. Moreover, it provides good performance in terms of load balancing, loss rate and overall throughput.