Unlike Wi-Fi, Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) technology provides a high-speed communication in a wide area. The IEEE 802.16 (WiMAX) standard of wireless mesh networks is one of the widely used BWA standards. WiMAX mesh mode achieves data transmission in conflict-free manner in multihop networks by using the control messages (three way handshake messages or MSH-DSCH messages) to reserve channel for sending data. Concurrently, the coordination of three way handshake messages depends on the mechanism named Election based Transmission Timing (EBTT). However, IEEE 802.16 mesh mode uses a static holdoff algorithm, which leads to a low performance in the majority of cases. In this paper, after analyzing the IEEE 802.16 mesh mode with coordinated distributed scheduling, we propose a novel method to improve the throughput by a dynamic holdoff algorithm. The simulation results show that our proposal gets a better throughput performance.

Wireless LAN (WLAN) roaming systems, such as eduroam, enable the mutual use of WLAN facilities among multiple organizations. As a consequence of the strong demand for WLAN roaming, it is utilized not only at universities and schools but also at the venues of large events such as concerts, conferences, and sports events. Moreover, it has also been reported that WLAN roaming is useful in areas afflicted by natural disasters. This paper presents a novel WLAN roaming system over Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) that is useful for the use cases shown above. The proposed system is based on two methods as follows: 1) Automatic authentication path generation method decreases the WLAN roaming system deployment costs including the wiring cost and configuration cost. Although the wiring cost can be reduced by using WMN technologies, some additional configurations are still required if we want to deploy a secure user authentication mechanism (e.g. IEEE 802.1X) on WLAN systems. In the proposed system, the Access Points (APs) can act as authenticators automatically using RadSec instead of RADIUS. Therefore, the network administrators can deploy 802.1X-based authentication systems over WMNs without additional configurations on-site. 2) Local authentication method makes the system deployable in times of natural disasters, in particular when the upper network is unavailable or some authentication servers or proxies are down. In the local authentication method, users and APs can be authenticated at the WMN by locally verifying the digital certificates as the authentication credentials.

In this paper, we investigate the problems of the established congestion solution and then introduce a self-adjustable rate control that supports quality of service assurances over multi-hop wireless mesh networks. This scheme eliminates two phases of the established congestion solution and works on the MAC layer for congestion control. Each node performs rate control by itself so network congestion is eliminated after it independently collects its vector parameters and network status parameters for rate control. It decides its transmission rate based on a predication model which uses a rate function including a congestion risk level and a passing function. We prove that our scheme works efficiently without any negative effects between the network layer and the data link layer. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme is more effective and has better performance than the existing method.

This study proposes an efficient identity-based secure routing protocol based on Weil pairing, that considers symmetric and asymmetric links for Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs). A wireless mesh network is a group of wireless mesh routers and several types of wireless devices (or nodes). Individual nodes cooperate by forwarding packets to each other, allowing nodes to communicate beyond the symmetric or asymmetric links. Asymmetric communication is a special feature of WMNs because of the wireless transmission ranges of different wireless devices may be different. The asymmetric link enhances WMN coverage. Ensuring security in WMNs has become an important issue over the last few years. Existing research on this topic tends to focus on providing security for routing and data content in the symmetric link. However, most studies overlook the asymmetric link in WMNs. This study proposes a novel distributed routing protocol that considers symmetric and asymmetric links. The proposed protocol guarantees the security and high reliability of the established route in a hostile environment, such as WMNs, by avoiding the use of unreliable intermediate nodes. The routes generated by the proposed protocol are shorter than those in prior studies. The major objective of the proposed protocol is to allow trustworthy intermediate nodes to participate in the path construction protocol. Using the proposed protocol, mesh clients out of mesh router wireless transmission range may discover a secure route to securely connect to the mesh router for Internet access. The proposed protocol enhances wireless mesh network coverage and assures security.

In time division multiple access (TDMA)-based wireless mesh networks, interference relationships should be considered when time slots are assigned to links. In graph theory-based time slot assignment algorithms, the protocol interference model is widely used to determine radio interference information, although it is an inaccurate model of actual radio interference. On the other hand, the signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio model (SINR model) gives more accurate interference relationships but is difficult to apply to time slot assignment algorithms since the radio interference information cannot be determined before time slot assignment. In this paper, we investigate the effect of the parameters of the protocol interference model on the accuracy of the interference relationships determined using this model. Specifically, after assigning time slots to links based on the protocol interference model with various interference ratios, which is the major parameter of the protocol interference model, we compare the interference relationship among links in the protocol interference and SINR models. Through simulation experiments, we show that accuracy of the protocol interference model is improved by up to 15% by adjusting the interference ratios of the protocol interference model.

We investigate the problem of joint frequency and power allocation in wireless mesh networks, using a self-pricing game based solution. In traditional pricing game models, the price factor is determined from the global information of the network, which causes heavy communication overhead. To overcome this problem, we propose a self-pricing game model, in which the price factor is determined by the distributed access points processing their individual information; moreover, it is implemented in an autonomous and distributed fashion. The existence and the efficiency of Nash equilibrium (NE) of the proposed game are studied. It is shown that the proposed game based solution achieves near cooperative network throughput while it reduces the communication overhead significantly. Also, a forcing convergence algorithm is proposed to counter the vibration of channel selection. Simulation results verify the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed scheme.

To provide convenient wireless access, wireless mesh networks (WMNs) can be rapidly deployed and connected for mobile clients. Although route redirection traffic control schemes and dynamic routing metrics can be used to improve the performance of WMNs, more of the available network bandwidth will be consumed by control message exchange. This paper proposes a capacity-aware and multipath supported traffic control framework in WMNs. The proposed framework can be used to dispatch data traffic in a multipath manner to improve the utilization of wireless links and forwarding latency. A hierarchical queue architecture is proposed to monitor and classify network traffic without the effort of control message exchange. Our traffic control strategy, which is based on local minimization of the forwarding latency, consists of two phases to automatically adapt to the utilization rate of the network links. In the first phase, the incoming packets are dispatched to the lower level queues according to the Internet gateway capacity. In the second phase, the packets are dispatched to the related network links according to the link load. The current study implements the proposed traffic control system on NS2 for simulation and on Linux 2.6 for real traffic analysis. Experimental results show that the proposed framework improves the throughput and reduces forwarding delay with an approximate minimum delay time. The results also show that the behavior of the long-term delay model can be applied to short-term traffic control methods in WMNs.

The aggregate throughput of wireless mesh networks (WMNs) can be significantly improved by equipping the mesh routers with multiple radios tuned to orthogonal channels. Not only the links using orthogonal channels can be activated at a time, but some links in the same channel also can be activated concurrently if the Signal-to-Interference-and-Noise Ratio (SINR) at their receivers is not lower than the threshold, which is the spatial-reuse characteristic. STDMA is considered as one of the medium access schemes that can exploit spatial reuse to improve network throughput. Past studies have shown that optimizing the performance of STDMA is NP-Hard. Therefore, we propose a STDMA-based scheduling algorithm that operates in a greedy fashion for WMNs. We show that the proposed algorithm enhances not only the throughput but also the fairness by capturing the essence of spatial-reuse approach of STDMA and giving medium access opportunities to each network element based on its priority. We furthermore validate our algorithm through theoretical analysis and extensive simulations and the results show that our algorithm can outperform state-of-the-art alternatives.

With the increasing popularity of multicast and real-time streaming service applications, efficient channel assignment algorithms that handle both multicast and unicast traffic in wireless mesh networks are needed. One of the most effective approaches to enhance the capacity of wireless networks is to use systems with multiple channels and multiple radio interfaces. However, most of the past works focus on vertex coloring of a general contention graph, which is NP-Complete, and use the greedy algorithm to achieve a suboptimal result. In this paper, we combine unicast and multicast with a transmission set, and propose a framework named Chordal Graph Based Channel Assignment (CGCA) that performs channel assignment for multicast and unicast traffic in multi-channel multi-radio wireless mesh networks. The proposed framework based on chordal graph coloring minimizes the interference of the network and prevents unicast traffic from starvation. Simulation results show that our framework provides high throughput and low end-to-end delay for both multicast and unicast traffic. Furthermore, our framework significantly outperforms other well-known schemes that have a similar objective in various scenarios.

In this letter, we present a flow-aware opportunistic routing protocol over wireless mesh networks. Firstly, a forwarder set selection mechanism is proposed to avoid potential flow contention, thus alleviating possible congestion from the increased number of flows. Secondly, a Round-Robin packet sending fashion combined with batch-by-batch acknowledgement is introduced to provide reliability and improve throughput. Evaluations show that our protocol significantly outperforms a seminal opportunistic routing protocol, MORE, under both single and multiple flow scenarios.

Broadband wireless access networks are promising technology for providing better end user services. For such networks, designing a scheduling algorithm that fairly allocates the available bandwidth to the end users and maximizes the overall network throughput is a challenging task. In this paper, we develop a centralized fair scheduling algorithm for IEEE 802.16 mesh networks that exploits the spatio-temporal bandwidth reuse to further enhance the network throughput. The proposed mechanism reduces the length of a transmission round by increasing the number of non-contending links that can be scheduled simultaneously. We also propose a greedy algorithm that runs in polynomial time. Performance of the proposed algorithms is evaluated by extensive simulations. Results show that our algorithms achieve higher throughput than that of the existing ones and reduce the computational complexity.

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are gaining significant momentum as a promising technology for the next-coming state-of-the-art wireless networking. Among many factors, the performance of WMNs would be largely affected by the properness of the deployed routing protocols and the efficient usage of wireless resources. Routing protocols are required to well capture WMNs' features while wireless channels should be used efficiently in order to accommodate high amount of traffics over the mesh backbone. Recently, a Tree-based Routing (TBR) protocol become a popular state-of-the-art proactive routing protocol and its tree-based broadcasting become an often used technique. Though TBR protocol is well-suited for WMNs' architecture and the skewed nature of traffic toward the root, the protocol in its current form faces issues which has to be addressed. Specifically, when some or all nodes are equipped with multiple radios, to reduce collision and co-channel interference, not only the parent-child relationship but also the sibling relationship need to be constructed by the TBR protocol in the multi-channel WMNs. In this paper, we propose a hybrid tree-based protocol for concurrent routing and channel assignment over WMNs. The protocol makes use of sibling links to mitigate the aforementioned shortcomings of TBR protocol. Moreover, in order to address high backbone traffic, the protocol integrates a receiver-based channel assignment scheme. The protocol efficiently deploys the parent-child topological relationships of nodes to enhance efficiency of broadcast transmissions over receiver-based multi-channel WMNs. Simulation results over NS-2 network simulator reveal that our proposed hybrid tree-based protocol achieves much higher performance than the utilization of the original receiver-based CA and TBR protocol.