基于HWMP的先应树状路由算法研究

无线网状网是一种新兴的宽带无线网络接入技术,支持不同应用场景的无线接入。IEEE802.11s标准定义了一种默认的路由选择算法,称为混合无线网状网协议(HWMP)。HWMP将把树状路由为基础的先应路由模式和按需路由模式相结合。对先应路由模式进行改进,以减小网络开销,增强网络性能。从仿真结果可以看出,改进后的算法在数据包到达率、平均端到端时延和吞吐量指标上达到了更佳的性能。     

Multi-radio multi-channel routing metrics in IEEE 802.11s based wireless mesh networks

IEEE 802.11s is one of the emerging standards designed to build wireless mesh networks which may serve to extend the coverage of access networks. The default IEEE 802.11s path selection protocol Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol (HWMP) is based on the radio-aware airtime link metric (ALM) that outperforms the hop-count metric in single channel multi-hop wireless networks. However, this metric may lead to capacity degradation when multiple channels and/or multi-radio are used. To fully exploit the capacity gain of multiple channels use, new routing metrics have been proposed such as weighted cumulative expected transmission time, metric of interference and channel switching, interference aware routing metric, exclusive expected transmission time, and normalized bottleneck link capacity. These metrics distribute the data traffic load among channels and/or radios to reach the final destination. In this paper, we provide a qualitative comparison study that considers the characteristics of these metrics. Indeed, we substitute ALM by these different metrics, and we evaluate the performance of HWMP through simulation. Obtained results allow us to identify the appropriate use case of each metric.     

IEEE802.11s路由协议漏洞与攻击

IEEE802.11s是IEEE关于无线Mesh网络的规范。802.11s虽然沿用了IEEE802.11i的安全规范,但是对于路由协议的安全并没有做过多的定义,由此产生了一定的安全隐患。文章分析了IEEE802.11s标准(草案)中的路由协议的漏洞,并针对IEEE802.11s中使用的混合无线网状网协议(HybridWirelessMeshProtocol,HWMP)设计了两种攻击方式,从而破坏无线网状网络的可用性。通过在自行设计的路由器平台上实现无线攻击,并分析攻击对网络造成的影响来验证安全漏洞的存在性和可利用性。     

Proportional fairness in MAC layer channel access of IEEE 802.11s EDCA based wireless mesh networks

Fairness provisioning in IEEE 802.11s EDCA based Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) is a very challenging task due to relayed traffic and traffic load variation among mesh routers. Because of bursty traffic in general purpose community wireless mesh networks, proportional fairness is more suited than max–min fairness, where mesh routers and clients should get channel access proportional to their traffic load. However, proportional fairness is hard to achieve by solving optimization function because of non-linearity and non-concave property of the objective function. In this paper, a probabilistic approach is proposed to provide proportional fairness without solving global non-linear and non-concave optimization. Every mesh node use a load estimation strategy to estimate total traffic load that it needs to forward. The required channel share of a mesh node should be proportional to its traffic load, whereas, the total normalized channel share for all the contending mesh nodes should be kept less than unity to satisfy the clique constraint. The network architecture and contention property in WMN are explored to deduce the required channel share of mesh nodes. A probabilistic approach is used to tune the contention window based on the difference between actual channel share and required channel share, so that the node with more traffic load gets more channel share. A discrete time Markov Chain based modeling is used to deduce the overall network throughput for the proposed scheme. Simulation result shows that the proposed scheme works better than the standard IEEE 802.11s based EDCA MAC in terms of fairness and throughput.     

FastScan: a handoff scheme for voice over IEEE 802.11 WLANs

IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs are increasingly being used in enterprise environments for broadband access. Such large scale IEEE 802.11 WLAN deployments implies the need for client mobility support; a mobile station has to be “handed off” from one Access Point to another. Seamless handoff is possible for data traffic, which is not affected much by the handoff delay. However, voice traffic has stringent QoS requirements and cannot tolerate more than 50ms net handoff delay. The basic IEEE 802.11 handoff scheme (implemented in Layers 1 & 2) only achieves a handoff delay of 300ms at best, leading to disrupted connectivity and call dropping. The delay incurred in scanning for APs across channels contributes to 90% of the total handoff delay. In this paper, the FastScan scheme is proposed which reduces the scanning delay by using a client-based database. The net handoff delay is reduced to as low as 20 ms for IEEE 802.11b networks. We next suggest “Enhanced FastScan” that uses the direction and relative position of the client with respect to the current AP to satisfy the latency constraint in IEEE 802.11a scenarios, which have significantly higher scanning delays due to the larger number of channels. The proposed schemes do not need any changes in the infrastructure (access points) and require only a single radio and a small cache memory at the client side.     

A taxonomy and evaluation for developing 802.11‐based wireless mesh network testbeds

The definition of wireless mesh networks (WMNs) has been used in the literature to connote and epitomize the ideal, ubiquitous, pervasive, and autonomic networking technology. An increasing interest has been emerging on the development of 802.11‐based WMN testbeds to test the new ideas and approaches more realistically as opposed to relying solely on simulations. Although the developed testbeds have provided several insights to researchers for furthering the technology, there are still several issues that need to be addressed, particularly, with the approval of new standards, such as IEEE 802.11s, IEEE 802.11n, and IEEE 802.16, and upcoming protocols, such as IEEE 802.11ac, 802.11ad, 802.11ah, and 802.11af TV White Space efforts. In this paper, our goal is to provide a taxonomy and insightful guidelines for the creation of 802.11‐based WMN testbeds as well as to identify several features that future WMN testbeds should possess. Utilizing these features, we evaluate the existing WMN testbeds. Finally, in addition to the existing WMN testbed experiments conducted at several layers of the protocol stack, we provide a list of open future research issues that can benefit from experiments on WMN testbeds. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

基于平面路由的无线Mesh网切换技术

通过对无线Mesh网络区别于传统无线局域网的特性的分析,以及无线Mesh网的链路层切换机制、网络层切换机制的深入研究,提出了一种基于平面路由和移动IP的无线Mesh网络快速切换机制,并在该机制下给出了2种具体的实现方案。仿真分析表明,上述方案都充分利用了无线Mesh网络的特性,能够有效降低切换时延、减少数据包丢失率,基本可实现无线Mesh网络的无缝切换,并且能够保证与现有的IEEE802.11协议标准兼容。     

Proportional bandwidth allocation with consideration of delay constraint over IEEE 802.11e-based wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) extend the limited transmission coverage of wireless LANs by enabling users to connect to the Internet via a multi-hop relay service provided by wireless mesh routers. In such networks the quality of experience (QoE) depends on both the user location relative to the Internet gateway and the traffic load. Various channel access or queue management schemes have been proposed for achieving throughput fairness among WMN users. However, delay and bandwidth utilization efficiency of such schemes may be unacceptable for real-time applications. Accordingly, the present study proposes a proportional bandwidth allocation scheme with a delay constraint consideration for enhancing the QoE of users of WMNs based on the IEEE 802.11e standard. An analytical model of the proposed scheme is provided. Moreover, the performance of the proposed scheme is systematically compared with that of existing bandwidth allocation methods. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms previously proposed schemes in terms of both an improved throughput fairness among the WMN users and a smaller end-to-end transmission delay.     

Low-Latency Broadcast in Multirate Wireless Mesh Networks

In a multirate wireless network, a node can dynamically adjust its link transmission rate by switching between different modulation schemes. In the current IEEE802.11a/b/g standards, this rate adjustment is defined for unicast traffic only. In this paper, we consider a wireless mesh network (WMN), where a node can dynamically adjust its link-layer multicast rates to its neighbors, and address the problem of realizing low-latency network-wide broadcast in such a mesh. We first show that the multirate broadcast problem is significantly different from the single-rate case. We will then present an algorithm for achieving low-latency broadcast in a multirate mesh which exploits both the wireless multicast advantage and the multirate nature of the network. Simulations based on current IEEE802.11 parameters show that multirate multicast can reduce broadcast latency by 3-5 times compared with using the lowest rate alone. In addition, we show the significance of the product of transmission rate and transmission coverage area in designing multirate WMNs for broadcast     

基于IEEE 802．11s的无线Mesh网络路由协议研究

基于IEEE802．11s的无线Mesh网络已成为机动宽带接入技术研究领域的一个研究热点。对无线Mesh网络中的关键技术——混合无线Mesh协议（HWMP）进行详细的分析,与传统按需路由机制相比,该协议既具有先验式路由协议的灵活性,亦具备按需路由协议的有效性,同时,对该协议度量机制做出改进,其将在应急通信等特殊应用环境中发挥重要作用。     

Design and implementation of CLASS: A Cross-Layer ASSociation scheme for wireless mesh networks

This paper focuses on the design and implementation of CLASS, a Cross-Layer Association scheme for IEEE 802.11-based multi-hop wireless mesh networks. The widely-used association strategy in traditional IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs allows a Mobile Station (MS) to scan wireless access links and then associate with the Access Point (AP) that has the best Received Signal Strength Indication (RSSI) value. Unlike traditional wireless LANs, IEEE 802.11-based wireless mesh networks consist of a multi-hop wireless backhaul. As such, the performance experienced by an MS after association with a specific Mesh Access Point (MAP) depends heavily on the conditions of both the access link (e.g., traffic load of associated stations, the frame error rate between an MS and an MAP) and the mesh backhaul (e.g., end-to-end latency and asymmetric uplink/downlink transportation costs). That is, selecting the MAP that yields the “best” performance depends on several factors and cannot be determined solely on the RSSI of the MS-MAP access link. CLASS uses an end-to-end airtime cost metric to determine the MAP to which an MS should associate. The airtime cost metric is based on the IEEE 802.11s, and comprises the access link airtime cost and the backhaul airtime cost. The proposed association scheme considers the frame error rate for various packet sizes, the available bandwidth on the access link after the association of the new MS, and the asymmetric uplink and downlink transportation costs on the backhaul. All experimental results are based on actual Linux-base testbed implementation. We also implement a general Cross-Layer Service Middleware (CLSM) module that is used to monitor network conditions and gather relevant metrics and factor values. Experimental results show that the proposed association scheme is able to identify the MAP which yields the highest end-to-end network performance for the mobile stations after their associations.     

无线Mesh网络与IEEE802系列标准

无线宽带接入系统发展迅速,但带宽容量低、覆盖范围小等缺点限制了它的进一步发展。作为“最后一公里”宽带无线接入非常重要的技术之一。无线Mesh网络（WMN）可以和多种无线网络系统,如无线局域网（WLAN）、无线个域网（WPAN）以及无线城域网（WMAN）等相结合,改善无线网络的性能,提高网络的覆盖范围。随着无线Mesh网络技术的厂泛应用,IEEE802的相关标准组正在致力于推动WMN技术的发展,制订相关的技术标准。目前,WMN标准已经出现在IEEE802．11s、80215、802．16、802．20中。     

A Hybrid Centralized Routing Protocol for 802.11s WMNs

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are being widely accepted as a critical wireless access solution for various applications. Due to minimal mobility in mesh nodes, a backbone topology can be effectively maintained in WMN using a proactive routing protocol. In IEEE 802.11s standard, a tree-based routing (TBR) protocol is adopted as a viable proactive routing protocol for a WMN with user traffic flowing to/from a wired network through a root (i.e., a mesh portal). However, the performance of the TBR protocol degrades rapidly as the user traffic becomes dominated by intra-mesh traffic. The reason is that the routing path through the root even for intra-mesh traffic unnecessarily overloads the root. Furthermore, the TBR performance becomes more severe when the network size of WMN is large, which could lead to the huge amount of intra-mesh traffic towards the root. To overcome these problems, we propose a new routing mechanism, root driven routing (RDR) protocol, for the root to quickly determine the best-metric route for any source-destination pair of intra-mesh traffic. For inter-mesh traffic, the original TBR protocol is employed. Thus, the hybrid centralized routing protocol that combines TBR and RDR and is adaptive to all traffic scenarios. Our simulation results reveal that the proposed RDR protocol outperforms the TBR protocol with much lower average end-to-end delay and much higher packet delivery ratio for intra-mesh traffic. The simulation results also provide some insight into the right tradeoff between the TBR protocol and the RDR protocol to achieve the best performance of the hybrid centralized routing protocol for WMNs.     

Towards providing optimal energy‐efficiency and throughput for IEEE 802.11 WLANs

IEEE 802.11 wireless network standard has become one of the most used wireless networking technologies for smart devices as it offers mobility support and low cost deployment. However, these devices deeply rely on the energy provided by their batteries, which results in limited running time. IEEE 802.11 network standard provides stations with carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance for the medium access. Yet it results in stations to consume an important amount of power. Therefore, minimizing WiFi‐based energy consumption in smart devices has been received substantial attention in both academia and industry. Accordingly, this paper * proposes a novel beacon‐based energy‐efficient collision‐free medium access control protocol for any type of IEEE 802.11 stations, regardless of being stationary or mobile, or having different amount of traffic flow, transmission rates, or traffic types. The proposed scheme is valid for all types of low or wide bandwidth, single or multiuser multiple‐input multiple‐output WLAN channels, such as IEEE 802.11a\b\g\n\ac. In the proposed scheme, energy saving is achieved, enabling stations to transmit on the right time and maintaining stations in the doze state during a predetermined sleep_time interval after each successful frame transmission, by making use of modified control and management frames of the standard IEEE 802.11 protocol. The proposed scheme reduces the probability of collisions and may allow stations to enter the collision‐free state, regardless of the number of stations on the channel and their traffic types. Widespread simulations have been executed to validate the efficiency of the proposed method. The results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly increases overall throughput and reduces power consumption of stations over IEEE 802.11 WLANs.     

EFT: a high throughput routing metric for IEEE 802.11s wireless mesh networks

In this paper, we present a throughput-maximizing routing metric, referred to as expected forwarding time (EFT), for IEEE 802.11s-based wireless mesh networks. Our study reveals that most of the existing routing metrics select the paths with minimum aggregate transmission time of a packet. However, we show by analyses that, due to the shared nature of the wireless medium, other factors, such as transmission time of the contending nodes and their densities and loads, also affect the performance of routing metrics. We therefore first identify the factors that hinder the forwarding time of a packet. Furthermore, we add a new dimension to our metric by introducing traffic priority into our routing metric design, which, to the best of our knowledge, is completely unaddressed by existing studies. We also show how EFT can be incorporated into the hybrid wireless mesh protocol (HWMP), the path selection protocol used in the IEEE 802.11s draft standard. Finally, we study the performance of EFT through simulations under different network scenarios. Simulation results show that EFT outperforms other routing metrics in terms of average network throughput, end-to-end delay, and packet loss rate.     

Improving Delay and Jitter Performance in Wireless Mesh Networks for Mobile IPTV Services

Wireless mesh networking has recently emerged as a promising technology for the next-generation wireless networks. In wireless mesh networks (WMNs), it is practically attractive to support the low-cost quality-of-service (QoS) guaranteed mobile TV service. To meet this need, our study addresses how to improve the delay and jitter performance of mobile IPTV services over IEEE 802.11 based WMN. Particularly, we first discuss the adaptation of IEEE 802.11 MAC layer to construct a WMN with emphasis on mobile IPTV service; we then develop an enhanced version of Guaranteed-Rate (GR) packet scheduling algorithm, namely virtual reserved rate GR (VRR-GR), to further reduce the delay and suppress the jitter in multiservice network environment. Simulation results show that our proposed approach can satisfyingly prioritize mobile IPTV services in WMN, while providing non-IPTV services with what they need as well.      

Fast and reliable handoff for vehicular networks

A layer-3 mobility management scheme for an all-IP Wireless Access Network (WAN), and in particular for vehicular networks, is developed in this paper. The proposed method enables fast and reliable handoff. This feature is extremely important for high speed vehicular networks. Since vehicles are characterized by likely-predictable path, as well as very high speed, handoff events can and should be predicted in order to achieve fast and reliable handoff. As it is shown in this study, the proposed scheme can significantly reduce the packet loss ratio caused by frequent handoff events experienced by high speed vehicles. This scheme is topology-independent in the sense that it does not assume any network topology. The key idea is to use a topology-learning algorithm that enables to perform localized mobility management, by efficiently re-selecting a Mobility Anchor Point (MAP) node. The goal of the proposed scheme is to maintain a continues connection subject to user-dependent delay constraints, while minimizing the signaling cost and packet loss ratio associated with handoff events. This scheme is consistent with the existing mobility management schemes currently used in Mobile IP (MIP) and cellular networks, and it fits into the Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6) scheme defined in Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) for integrating mobile terminals with the Internet wired backbone.     

Mesh WLAN networks: concept and system design

In recent years WLAN technology has become the common wireless access technology for mobile computing. Additional to infrastructure access to WLAN networks, peer-to-peer and mesh networking are currently gaining in interest. Mesh networking techniques using WLAN are being standardized in IEEE 802.11s. This article describes use cases, the main technical issues, and a set of potential solutions for mesh network development. Furthermore, an overview of the standardization activities in IEEE 802.11s is presented. The key technical aspects of mesh networks identified are topology creation, routing, medium access control, security, quality of service, and power efficiency.     

Low-latency mobile IP handoff for infrastructure-mode wireless LANs

The increasing popularity of IEEE 802.11-based wireless local area networks (LANs) lends them credibility as a viable alternative to third-generation (3G) wireless technologies. Even though wireless LANs support much higher channel bandwidth than 3G networks, their network-layer handoff latency is still too high to be usable for interactive multimedia applications such as voice over IP or video streaming. Specifically, the peculiarities of commercially available IEEE 802.11b wireless LAN hardware prevent existing mobile Internet protocol (IP) implementations from achieving subsecond Mobile IP handoff latency when the wireless LANs are operating in the infrastructure mode, which is also the prevailing operating mode used in most deployed IEEE 802.11b LANs. In this paper, we propose a low-latency mobile IP handoff scheme that can reduce the handoff latency of infrastructure-mode wireless LANs to less than 100 ms, the fastest known handoff performance for such networks. The proposed scheme overcomes the inability of mobility software to sense the signal strengths of multiple-access points when operating in an infrastructure-mode wireless LAN. It expedites link-layer handoff detection and speeds up network-layer handoff by replaying cached foreign agent advertisements. The proposed scheme strictly adheres to the mobile IP standard specification, and does not require any modifications to existing mobile IP implementations. That is, the proposed mechanism is completely transparent to the existing mobile IP software installed on mobile nodes and wired nodes. As a demonstration of this technology, we show how this low-latency handoff scheme together with a wireless LAN bandwidth guarantee mechanism supports undisrupted playback of remote video streams on mobile stations that are traveling across wireless LAN segments.     

A survey of quality of service in IEEE 802.11 networks

Developed as a simple and cost-effective wireless technology for best effort services, IEEE 802.11 has gained popularity at an unprecedented rate. However, due to the lack of built-in quality of service support, IEEE 802.11 experiences serious challenges in meeting the demands of multimedia services and applications. This article surveys 802.11 QoS schemes, including service differentiation in the MAC layer, admission control and bandwidth reservation in MAC and higher layers, and link adaptation in the physical layer, designed to meet these challenges by providing the necessary enhancements for the required QoS. Furthermore, the article addresses issues that arise when end-to-end QoS has to be guaranteed in today's pervasive heterogeneous wired-cum-wireless networks. Among these challenges, protocol interoperability, multihop scheduling, full mobility support, and seamless vertical handoff among multiple mobile/wireless interfaces are specifically addressed.