An automatic mesh scheme for IEEE 802.11 wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) is a promising technology that provides broadband wireless Internet access. It is one of the most important challenges to establish multiple connections among stations (STAs) in WMNs. In this paper, we propose a novel automatic mesh scheme (AMS) of layer 2 to form WMN in IEEE 802.11 wireless networks. AMS establishes multiple connections from a STA to neighbor STAs and determines proper routing path effectively, where three objectives are optimized, i.e., minimizing the average hop count, balancing traffic load and without modifying the communicating procedure in IEEE 802.11 standard. AMS owns self-organization capacity, establishes multiple connections and determines routing path automatically. Our AMS only uses simple software functions without the cost of extra hardware overhead. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme significantly improves the system performance. Importantly, AMS that works very well has been implemented and exhaustively tested in a realistic test-bed.