Design and Performance Analysis of Mobility Management Schemes Based on Pointer Forwarding for Wireless Mesh Networks

We propose efficient mobility management schemes based on pointer forwarding for wireless mesh networks (WMNs) with the objective to reduce the overall network traffic incurred by mobility management and packet delivery. The proposed schemes are per-user-based, i.e., the optimal threshold of the forwarding chain length that minimizes the overall network traffic is dynamically determined for each individual mobile user, based on the user's specific mobility and service patterns. We develop analytical models based on stochastic Petri nets to evaluate the performance of the proposed schemes. We demonstrate that there exists an optimal threshold of the forwarding chain length, given a set of parameters characterizing the specific mobility and service patterns of a mobile user. We also demonstrate that our schemes yield significantly better performance than schemes that apply a static threshold to all mobile users. A comparative analysis shows that our pointer forwarding schemes outperform routing-based mobility management protocols for WMNs, especially for mobile Internet applications characterized by large traffic asymmetry for which the downlink packet arrival rate is much higher than the uplink packet arrival rate.