AKadeMesh: Software-defined overlay adaptation for the management of IEEE 802.11s networks

The new standard amendment IEEE 802.11s enables low-level interoperability for future WLAN mesh networks. Support of the Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol (HWMP) and the Airtime Link Metric (ALM) for MAC-layer routing is mandatory. Its default distance vector routing mode facilitates scalability but also results in a limited network view per mesh node. Moreover, mesh mechanisms operate transparently to higher layers which makes the management and optimization of 802.11s networks a challenging task. Available on every standard-compliant node, ALM offers the potential to derive mesh topology information. We present AKadeMesh (Adaptive Kad-enhanced Mesh), a cross-layer approach specifically designed for 802.11s networks. It is based on the P2P protocol Kad and dynamically adapts its logical overlay to the physical mesh underlay by directly considering ALM. The resulting topology-aware P2P overlay is used to realize logical clustering for the distributed management of 802.11s networks, thereby maintaining unrestrained interoperability to the mesh standard. Our solution was implemented and evaluated in a real-world test bed. Results demonstrate its practical feasibility and verify the expected clustering benefit.