Proxy protocol and PMIPv6 based mobility Management for IEEE 802.11s wireless mesh networks

In Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs), the development of mobility management for mesh clients is one of the most challenging issues since mesh clients need to be provided with continuous network access service, regardless of their movements. However, the IEEE 802.11s, which is the de facto standard for layer-2 WMNs, overlooks the mobility management without which the smooth operation of the network could be disturbed in a real environment. In this paper, we therefore propose a novel mobility management scheme for IEEE 802.11s based WMNs where a mesh client moves between mesh stations in both the same Mesh Basic Service Set (MBSS) and different MBSSs. Moreover, our proposed scheme is compatible with the existing IEEE 802.11s standard since it is based on the primitives defined in the IEEE 802.11s and PMB?v6. We implemented an IEEE 802.1 Is WMN testbed and our proposed mobility management protocol based on the open8021 Is implementation. From real experiments from this test-bed, we verify that our proposed mobility scheme provides mesh clients with acceptable performance in terms of TCP throughput, handover delay and protocol overhead.