WIANI: wireless infrastructure and ad-hoc network integration

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 an architecture, termed WIANI (wireless infrastructure and ad-hoc network integration), is able to extend the network coverage beyond the coverage of APs. Furthermore, users may take advantage of the ad hoc connections to forward local data and hence alleviate the traffic load through the AP and increase the network capacity. 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, a load-balancing zone forming algorithm and a weighted x-hop routing algorithm. Using simulation, we show that our protocol improves system throughput and reduces packet delivery delay.