Network resource aware association control in Wireless Mesh Networks

In a Wireless Mesh Network (WMN), the Mesh Access Points (MAPs) are connected to a wireless multi-hop mesh backhaul, which experiences constraints such as contention in the shared medium, bottleneck capacity at the backhaul, and unfairness to multi-hop MAPs. In this paper, we propose a cross-layer association scheme that takes access and backhaul link quality, network load, and backhaul contention into consideration. Our simulation results in the context of IEEE 802.11 based WMN show that the proposed association scheme is able to achieve improved end-to-end performance as well as improved network resource utilization efficiency.