A NOVEL APPROACH OF CHANNEL SPLITTING FOR REDUCING HANDOFF DELAY IN WIRELESS MESH NETWORKS

Abstract

A channel splitting scheme is proposed to improve both link and network-layer handoffs in WMNs. We first considered two setups when an MC has one or two transceivers and proposed different handoff procedures using the channel splitting strategy. In the first design, the time for the link-layer channel scanning process can be reduced, whereas in the second design, the handoff process and data reception can be executed at the same time. In both designs, the channel contentions between handoff signaling packets and data packets at each MR are eliminated. In addition, we proposed two transmission strategies in the wireless mesh backbone, i.e., SCT and CCT, to improve the overall handoff performance as well as the ETE data performance. OPNET simulation results show that the SCT design is more suitable to the high handoff frequency situation; on the other hand, the CCT design is fit for the low handoff frequency scenario. Simulation results also show that the handoff delay and data packet ETE delay can be significantly improved using the proposed channel splitting strategy, as compared with the traditional single-channel-based and priority-queue-based methods. Moreover, the average channel utilization can also be greatly improved by our proposed SCT and CCT designs, as compared with the twochannel- based design.