A Novel Unified Signaling Beacon for Traditional and Mesh WiFi Network
Kavin Kumar Thangadorai, Kumar Murugesan, Vimal Bastin Edwin Joseph, Debabrata Das · 2019
WiFi Mesh network is made up of Mesh Access Points (MAPs). MAPs perform two roles: Mesh Station (STA) to communicate with other MAPs, and Basic Service Set (BSS) AP to interact with WiFi client devices. Hence, MAPs typically broadcast two kinds of independent beacons periodically, which will be received by other MAPs and WiFi client devices. This could lead to multiple beacon collision scenarios. And these beacon collisions occur in Mesh STA or WiFi client devices when other MAPs are hidden (two hops away). We have proposed Unified Signaling Beacon Framework (USBF) concept to reduce the probability of these beacon collision substantially. The proposed USBF performs unification and synchronization between BSS AP and Mesh STA beacons in MAPs. Our simulation result with the proposed concept shows improvement of beacon processing time (reduced around 35%), and total energy consumption (reduced around 22%).