Towards the design of an energy-aware path selection metric for IEEE 802.11s wireless mesh network
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Date
2012
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Publisher
University of Zululand
Abstract
It is everyone’s dream to have network connectivity all the time. This dream can only be
realised provided there are feasible solutions that are put in place for the next generation of
wireless works. Wireless Mesh Networking (WMN) is therefore seen as a solution to the next
generation of wireless networks because of the fact that WMNs configures itself and it is also
self healing. A new standard for WMNs called the IEEE 802.11s is still under development.
The protocol that is used by the IEEE 802.11s for routing is called Hybrid Wireless Mesh
Protocol (HWMP). The main purpose of HWMP is to perform routing at layer-2 of the OSI
model also referred to as the data link layer (DLL). Layer-2 routing is also referred to as the
mesh path selection and forwarding. Devices that are compliant to the IEEE 802.11s standard
will be able to use this path selection protocol. Devices that are manufactured by different
vendors will therefore be interoperable. Even though significant efforts have gone into improving the performance of HWMP, the
protocol still faces a lot of limitations and the most limiting factor is the small or restricted
energy of the batteries in a wireless network. This is because of the assumption that mesh
nodes that are deployed in urban areas tend to have no energy constraints while WMN nodes
deployed in rural faces serious energy challenges. The latter relies on batteries and not on
electricity supply which powers the WMN nodes in urban areas. This work, therefore, explores
further the current trends towards maximising the network lifetime for the energy constrained
networks. Hence the goal of this study is to design a path selection algorithm that is energyaware
and optimising for the IEEE 802.11s based HWMP. The main idea is that paths with enough energy for transmission must be selected when
transmitting packets in the network. Therefore, a simulation using NS-2 was carried out to
assess the network performance of the proposed EAPM metric with the other metrics that have
been analysed in literature including ETX. ETX has been used in WMNs but was not
developed specifically for mesh. In conclusion, EAPM conserves more energy than the Multimetric,
airtime link metric and lastly ETX. The simulation experiments show that EAPM
optimises the energy used in the network and as a result EAPM has a prolonged network
lifespan when comparing it to the rest of the metrics evaluated in this study. The results also
revealed that the newly proposed EAPM exhibits superior performance characteristics even
with regard to issues like end-to-end delay and packet delivery ratio.
Description
Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Communication Science at the University of Zululand, South Africa, 2012.
Keywords
Network connectivity, Wireless Mesh Networking, Wireless Networks