Mobility management for Wi-Fi infrastructure and mesh networks

Abstract

This thesis shows that mobility management protocols for infrastructure Internet may be used in a wireless mesh network environment. In this research Mobile IPv6 and Fast Handover for Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 are successfully implemented in a wireless mesh network environment. Two experiments were carried out: vertical and horizontal handover simulations. Vertical handover simulation involved a heterogeneous wireless environment comprising both wireless local area and wireless mesh networks. An OPNET Mobile IPv6 model was used to simulate the vertical handover experiment. Horizontal handover simulation involved Mobile IPv6 and Fast Handover for Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 applied in ns2 wireless mesh network. The vertical handover results show that MIPv6 is able to manage vertical handover between wireless local area and wireless mesh network. The horizontal handover results illustrate that in mesh networks, Fast Handover for Hierarchical Mobile IPv6's performance is superior to Mobile IPv6. Fast Handover for Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 generates more throughput and less delay than Mobile IPv6. Furthermore, Fast Handover for Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 drops less data packets than Mobile IPv6. The simulations indicate that even though there are multi-hop communications in wireless mesh networks, the performance of the multi-hop routing may not play a big role in the handover performance. This is so because the mesh routers are mostly static and the multi-hop routes are readily available. Thus, the total handover delay is not affected too much by the WMN hops in the paths for signaling message transmission.