WIANI: wireless infrastructure and ad-hoc network integration
Jiancong Chen, Shejie Li, S.-H. Gary Chan, Jingyi He · 2005
Abstract — Wireless networks have been widely deployed in recent years to provide high-speed Internet access to mobile users. In traditional IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs, all users directly connect to an access point (AP) and all packets are forwarded by the AP. As a result, the coverage and capacity of the network is limited. If ad hoc mode is adopted in both the AP and mobile nodes, the one hop connections from AP can be extended to multiple hops. Such arhitecture, termed WIANI (Wireless Infrastructure and Ad-Hoc Network Integration) in this paper, is able to extend the network coverage beyond the coverage of APs. Furthermore, the users may take advantage of the ad hoc connections to forward local data and hence alleviating the traffic load through the AP and increasing the network capacity. In this paper, we propose a dynamic load-balancing protocol for WIANI in which all APs and nodes operate in ad hoc mode. Our protocol consists of two parts: the load-balancing zone forming and weighted x−hop routing algorithms. Using simulation, we show that our protocol improves system throughput and reduce packet delivery delay. Index Terms — Multi-hop wireless LAN, load-balancing routing, infrastructure network, ad hoc network, IEEE 802.11