Association information management using MAC subnet addressing in Wireless Mesh Networks

Station association information, such as an associated mesh router is required to support communication between legacy stations in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN). Current IEEE 802.11s draft standard specifies two mechanisms to maintain the station association information: Proxy Registration Procedure (PRP) and Association Discovery Protocol (ADP). Each of them has structural limitations in that mesh routers always maintain a station association information table. Consequently, the more the number of station and mobility increases, the more management overhead increases. In this paper, we propose the method of station association information and forwarding frame using MAC subnet addressing without a station association information table. According to simulations, we results in significant improvement in terms of management frame overhead and frame transmission delay.