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Design and Implementation of a Cooperative Protocol for Extending Coverage in Wireless Mesh Networks

Authors:
Andres Cabrera-Lozoya
Fernando Cerdan
Sergio Lujan
Diego Garcia-Sanchez

Keywords: wireless mesh network; coverage extension; power saving mechanism; performance evaluation

Abstract:
Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have attracted great attention in the last few years because of their advantages over traditional wireless networks. WMNs can be seen as a mixture of ad hoc and infrastructure networks, with all the underlying benefits of such hybrid architecture. Mesh architecture sustains signal strength by breaking long distances into a series of shorter hops through intermediate nodes which not only boost the signal, but cooperatively act extending the network coverage and even forwarding decisions based on their knowledge about the network itself. This paper presents the main design and implementation aspects of a cooperative protocol that allows the coverage extension in these WMNs. It also provides a power saving mechanism for nodes which mainly operate as gateways by simply relaying data from or to neighbouring nodes. Simulation results show that the introduction of the protocol drastically increases the volume of carried traffic on the network due to its coverage extension capabilities. They also show that the power saving mechanism works properly, thus introducing key configuration parameters in the design of WMNs.

Pages: 26 to 32

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2011

Publication date: August 21, 2011

Published in: conference

ISBN: 978-1-61208-147-2

Location: Nice/Saint Laurent du Var, France

Dates: from August 21, 2011 to August 27, 2011