Design and implementation of multi-channel multi-radio wireless mesh network system

Abstract

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have received tremendous interest as a key technology for next generation wireless networking due to their advantages. Many researchers have increased the available bandwidth of WMNs by using multiple non-overlapping channels and multiple radios. Among multi-channel multi-radio protocols, hybrid multi-channel protocol (HMCP) has been revealed as an optimal scheme for improving the capacity of WMNs compared with other protocols. Net-X provides a generic software architecture that supports the implementation of multi-channel multi-radio protocols based on HMCP. However, Net-X has several critical problems as a backbone network for the network access. In this thesis, we propose MMRC system architecture based on Net-X to solve the critical problems of the Net-X and provide fast seamless han-doff. We also implement MMRC system architecture and do experiment with various traffic types to evaluate performance of MMRC. The experiment results show that the throughput of UDP and TCP at 4 hops is 25.1 Mbps and 3.6 Mbps in MMRC network, respectively. The measurement result of network layer han-doff latencies is at most 73ms in the presence of background traffic load. The results show that MMRC satisfies the requirements of high-speed last mile connectivity, broadband bandwidth and real time applications such as voice-over-IP (VoIP) as a backbone.