A cost aware reconfiguration technique for recovery in wireless mesh networks

Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is considered as one of the inevitable technologies in the world of networking because of its ability to provide high bandwidth wireless backbone covering a large physical region. Generally, mesh routers which make use of single radio and single channel suffer from capacity issues. This can be overcome by configuring mesh nodes using multiple radios and multiple channels. But during their lifetime, multi radio wireless mesh networks are severely affected because of the frequent link failures caused by interference, obstacles in motion and bandwidth requirements of the application. This paper presents a detailed study on various techniques used to recover wireless mesh network from link failures and the issues to be addressed in order to improve the performance of the network. Further, this paper proposes an Enhanced Reconfiguration System (ERS) which provides cost aware reconfiguration scheme that enables WMNs to recover from local link failures. ERS makes use of primitive link changes such channel, radio and route switch operations to recover WMNs from link failures. It generates a set of reconfiguration plans and selects the best plan which provides the required service at minimal cost. The system cooperatively reconfigures network settings among all mesh routers based on this best reconfiguration plan and thus maximizes the network performance.