Scalable mobility management in large-scale wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networking (WMN) is an economic means to provide the last-mile Internet access service through ad hoc peer-to-peer communication links. However, WMNs suffer from scalability, performance degradation and service disruption issues due to inherent network mobility. In this paper, we present a mobility management protocol, called HDR (Hierarchical Directory Resolution), using a hierarchical Distributed Hash Table (DHT) approach. Different from prior DHT solutions that were based on consistent hashing algorithms, HDR uses a novel NCR (neighbor-aware contention resolution) algorithm to maintain the DHT lookup functions. Simulation results validate the correctness and advantages of our proposed protocol.