A low-cost channel scheduling design for multi-hop handoff delay reduction in internet-based wireless mesh networks

Seamless handoff support is an essential issue to ensure continuous communications in multi-hop wireless mesh networks (WMNs). Due to the multi-hop transmission of network-layer handoff signaling packets, the handoff performance in WMNs can be largely degraded by the long queueing delay and medium access delay at each mesh router, especially when the backbone traffic volume is high. However, this issue is ignored in existing handoff solutions and multi-channel allocation schemes. In this paper, we address the seamless handoff support from a different perspective and propose a novel channel allocation design in hierarchical WMNs to reduce the queueing delay and medium access delay of handoff signaling packets over multihop wireless links and to improve the average channel utilization simultaneously. Both analytical and OPNET simulation results show that the performance of the average channel utilization and total handoff delay can be improved significantly using our proposed channel allocation scheme under various scenarios, as compared to other existing channel allocation and handoff solutions in multi-hop WMNs.