On-demand selection, control and management of context-based Wireless Mesh Networks

The flexible infrastructure of Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) can be exploited to provide support to emerging communication paradigms. In this paper we consider an architecture of context-based virtual WMNs, where the context requirements and preferences of mesh clients are the driving force to dynamically create and configure, through network virtualization, a set of logical networks (each one specific to a set of context levels) on top of the physical infrastructure. This paper proposes a context-aware framework to match and select available Virtual Networks (VNs) for users, avoiding the constant creation of new VNs to serve single users. A control mechanism is presented to create, update, reconfigure, and terminate VNs on-demand. Several aspects of this control mechanism are analytically evaluated and compared against a simulation study, showing very similar results. Moreover, we evaluate the performance gains of our architecture when compared to other approaches in the field of WMNs. The obtained results show the small VN control signaling delays and overhead, the decrease of the number of nodes involved in a VN reconfiguration, and the increase of the average user throughput of our approach when compared to the others; they also show the gains of re-using available VNs avoiding the constant creation of new VNs.