Multi-Hop Wireless Relay Networks of Mesh Clients

In typical deployments of infrastructure wireless mesh networks, mesh clients are directly connected to a mesh router. The mesh routers form a multi-hop wireless mesh backbone to provide connectivity to the Internet. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a set of distributed algorithms that enable mesh clients to form a multi-hop wireless relay network to have access to the mesh backbone. The proposed algorithms include path discovery, channel allocation, path selection, and local tuning of the resulting relay network. Results show that the performance of the relay network formed by our algorithms is very close to the optimal performance that the network can achieve.