Mesh topology construction for interconnected wireless LANs

A wireless mesh network extends wireless local area network systems, which are widely implemented today to provide hot spot coverage, by implementing a reliable meshed network that serves to interconnect the access points managing each wireless local area network. The 802.11s working group has been formed recently to recommend an extended service set (ESS) that enables wider area communications among distributed clients, each of which has access to an IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN (WLAN). Such coverage can be provided by the implementation of a mesh backbone network that serves to interconnect the WLAN access points (APs). In this paper, we present a scalable, fully distributed topology control algorithm for constructing such a mesh backbone network of access points. Multi-hop communications among distant client stations take place in accordance with a routing algorithm that uses the mesh backbone to establish inter-WLAN routes. The presented topology construction algorithm and its employment by the presented routing mechanism are shown to improve the asynchronous, distributed and stable operation of the network. We prove that the topology construction and control algorithm introduced in this paper is highly scalable and efficient. The implementation complexity of the required communications control (and its associated overhead) and its temporal convergence features are independent of the number of network nodes.