MASS: Multiple ASSociation Scheme in IEEE 802.11 Wireless Mesh Networks
Haidong Zhang, Pin Lv, Yingwen Chen, Ming Xu · 2012
Traditional association mechanism in IEEE 802.11 is in the form of one-to-many. It indicates that an access point (AP) can associate with many clients at the same time, while one client is capable to be associated with only one AP at a time. Such policy is inefficient and inflexible in the context of wireless mesh network (WMN). In this paper, we propose a many-to-many association scheme called Multiple ASSociation (MASS) for IEEE 802.11 WMN. The MASS allows a Mesh Client (MC) to be associated with multiple Mesh APs (MAPs) simultaneously. The most appropriate MAP is selected adaptively from a group of MAPs to actually serve the MC based on its correspondence node. Consequently, when the MC communicates with different nodes, probably distinct MAPs are employed to forward its packets. The protocol is compatible with current IEEE 802.11 standards and does not need any modification on the MC. We conduct extensive experiments which demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of the proposed scheme.