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

In Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs), the mobility management for mesh clients is one of the most challenging issues since they need to be provided with continuous network access service, regardless of their movements. However, the IEEE 802.11s, standard protocol for layer-2 WMNs, overlooks mobility management, which can disturb the smooth operation of the network in a real environment. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel mobility management scheme that is compatible with the existing IEEE 802.11s standard. Our scheme performs intra-Mesh Basic Service Set (intra-MBSS) and inter-MBSS mobility management based on the proxy protocol in IEEE 802.11s and PMIPv6, without any modification of protocol messages and their usages. We implemented an IEEE 802.11s WMN test-bed and a mobility management protocol based on the open80211s implementation. We used this test-bed to verify that our proposed scheme achieves good performance in terms of TCP throughput and packet loss rate between mesh clients.