2009 International Conference on Future Computer and Communication

Optimal Path Discovery with Mobility Management in Heterogeneous Mesh Networks

I. A. Shah, S. Jan, S. A. Mahmud and H.S. Al-Raweshidy
School of Engineering and Design, Brunel University West London, UK. ibrar.shah @brunel.ac.uk
Abstract Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) is a promising technology for backhaul wireless connectivity in user premises due to its multi-hop nature, multi-radio multi-channel capabilities and stable power supplies. With proliferation of new and advanced access technologies, future WMNs will be an integrated paradigm to provide seamless and ubiquitous connectivity to multi interface end user devices. Co-existence of multiple heterogeneous interfaces on wireless mesh routers increases overall network capacity, resilience and availability in the mesh backhaul as compared to homogenous radios mesh networks. In this paper, we present a novel architecture for heterogeneous WMNs based on integrated IEEE 802.11/16/15 technologies and discuss issues, possible solutions and future insight. We propose an optimal route algorithm along with radio assignment graph which captures the heterogeneity of radios. We also present a handover mechanism for seamless interface switch for mobile and static end user devices. Keywords- Wireless mesh networks, interfaces, Radio assignment, Routing. Heterogeneous

I.

INTRODUCTION

WMNs [1] are multi-hop wireless networks having self healing, self organization and self configuration characteristics. Unlike Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) [2], it is a promising technology to provide broadband wireless connectivity in the user premises due to rich resources, fixed wireless mesh points having stable power supplies. The multi-hop capability results in a scalable solution for otherwise limited ranged networks. These networks are highly resilient as failure of some nodes has no effect on connectivity of end users and overall network at large. The always connected and robust nature of WMN qualifies it to be deployed as future broadband wireless solution in the user premises. Due to the advantages of WMNs, IEEE has established subgroups to include mesh capability in their standards like IEEE 802.11s [3] for Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), IEEE 802.15.5 [4] for Wireless Personnel Area Networks (WPANs) and IEEE 802.16e [5] for Wireless Metropolitan Area Networks (WMANs). Many commercial products are also available in market for deployment of WMN [6]. On the other hand, wireless nature of medium combined with multi-hop relaying raise many issues for WMNs to be deployed as a large scale broadband solution. For example, theoretically, the upper bound on per node throughput in a

WLAN based mesh is limited by (1/n log n) [7], which shows a drastic decrease in overall network throughput when the number of mesh relay nodes(n) increases. The inevitable multi-hop relaying consumes too much network resources as packets are broadcasted by each mesh router leading to network delays and congestion. Deploying WMN based on a specific technology has its own advantages and limitations. WPAN based mesh networks can achieve high data rate with low power consumption at the expense of limited range and can only be deployed in small offices. WLAN based mesh networks can achieve acceptable throughput in small to medium mesh networks but can not be implemented in large area as the network performance drastically decreases with increase in the number of hops. WiMAX [8] based mesh networks can be a good candidate to be deployed as wireless broadband solution over larger areas with high data rates. It also has some limitations like minimum frequency reuse and high power consumption. Keeping these limitations in view in different technologies for large area mesh deployment, integration of these diverse technologies in a mesh backhaul will be a feasible solution to reap the advantages of each. Integrating different technology radios on backhaul mesh routers not only gives more choices to end users in terms of availability, flexibility and reliability but also improves the overall mesh backbone capacity and network robustness. The rest of this paper is organized as follow: In Section II, a brief discussion is given about relevant research work. Section III describes our proposed architecture and its research issues at different layers of protocol stack. This section also presents our new proposed graph model for radio assignment and routing. Mobility management scheme and interface switch strategies in heterogeneous mesh networks is discussed in section IV. Finally, we concluded our work and suggest some directions for future work in section V. II. RELATED WORK Multi-radio multi-channels approach in IEEE 802.11 based wireless mesh networks has been widely studied in literature during the past few years. It is a hot research topic due to multiple available non overlapping channels and multiple radios can be tuned simultaneously to increase capacity and connectivity of the overall network. A centralized, graph based approach has been proposed in [9],
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978-0-7695-3591-3/09 $25.00 2009 IEEE DOI 10.1109/ICFCC.2009.21

[10] and [11] where links and nodes are considered as edges and vertices of a graph respectively and formulating radio/channel assignment by assigning edges to vertices. The limitation of these methods is that it is very difficult to capture network load information with a graph model. Network flow based centralized approaches can be found in [12],[13] and [14], where multi radio multi-channel is modeled based on network flows and therefore overcomes the limitations associated with graph based approaches. These approaches are not realistic as constant traffic sources are assumed all the time while network traffic can be bursty in nature. A distributed gateway centered multi-radio multichannel approach has been developed by [15] and [16] where mesh gateways are considered as sink and source of data. All the above approaches consider coexistence of more than one interfaces/radios of the same standard (homogenous) on a mesh router and use more than one available orthogonal channel. In [17], authors have addressed co-existence of heterogeneous interfaces and introduced a radio based novel graph model which captures the heterogeneity of interfaces. They have also formulated scheduling, routing and channel assignment as an optimization problem. Their results show improvement in network capacity while preserving node level fairness. They have addressed the heterogeneity of interfaces belonging to same technology i.e coexistence of IEEE 802.11a, 802.11b and 802.11g on the same mesh point. Integration of WiFi and WiMAX mesh is presented in [18], where an architecture is proposed and the benefits of heterogeneous mesh have been highlighted by formulating it as an optimization problem. In this paper, we present a novel architecture for wireless mesh network integrating WiFi, WiMAX and WPAN radios at mesh points/mesh routers in the mesh backhaul. III. HETEROGENEOUS MULTI-RADIO MESH NETWORKS

Figure 1. Heterogeneous WMN architecture

technologies, e.g. two devices in different buildings have WPAN connectivity with their local mesh routers but interbuilding communication path is through WLAN. The third type of connection has a complete heterogeneous nature, having three access technologies on end-to-end path. The last case is possible when an end device is connected to its in-building router through a WPAN interface, which is connected to a tier-2 mesh router through WLAN interface and the tier-2 mesh router is further connected to the gateway through WiMAX connection. In our proposed architecture, user traffic intended for a specific tier does not go through higher tiers and thus improvement can be expected in the overall backhaul performance. A heterogeneous mesh backhaul not only gives more choices to end users in terms of availability, flexibility and reliability but can also improve the mesh backbone capacity and network robustness. B. Issues and possible solutions Integration of multiple standard technologies in mesh backhaul results in a flexible, robust, reliable and always connected network in the user premises. There are several issues in integration of different heterogeneous interfaces on mesh routers due to the difference in their data rates, spectrum, access mechanisms, power consumption and range. Issues at MAC and routing layers along with handover mechanisms should be properly addressed and intelligent algorithms must be designed along with cross layer design techniques for optimization. In this section, we discuss issues, which arise from such architecture at different protocol layers and suggest some possible solutions. C. Medium Access Control (MAC) layer issues Since medium access mechanism of each technology is different, we propose a hybrid MAC layer in our architecture. As shown in Fig. 2, hybrid MAC is an additional layer between layer 2 and layer 3. The core

A. Architecture As shown in Fig. 1, a wireless mesh backhaul, consisting of wireless mesh routers having heterogeneous interfaces, is divided into three tiers. In tier-1, end user devices, having multiple heterogeneous interfaces, are interconnected inside rooms and offices of a building through mesh routers. This intra-building communication can be carried out through either WLANs or WPANs depending upon distance, end user application requirements and availability of these access technologies. For inter-building communication between devices, tier-2 is used. Tier-2 consists of mesh routers having integrated WLAN and WiMAX interfaces to provide connectivity to devices in a campus. Tier-2 also provides connectivity to the Internet via tier-3. Tier-3 connects campuses and other community sites in a city to the Internet via mesh gateways. Three types of end-to-end connections are possible between end devices and mesh gateways. Fully homogenous connections having same access technology form an end device to other end device or mesh gateway. Some end to end connections may have two different access

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Figure 2. Hybrid MAC layer

function of this layer is to coordinate among these different radios and selection of an appropriate one for communication with next hop. Radio selection of a mesh router to reach its next neighbor can be based on performance metrics such as data rate, delay, interference, congestion, link load and error rate of a specific radio interface. Hybrid MAC layer continuously gets this information from the underlying MAC of different technologies. Since there may be frequency overlap between different radios spectrum, intelligent interference aware algorithms must be designed to minimize inter-radio and intra-radio interference. Interface selection is one of the most important tasks at client side. Equipped with heterogeneous interfaces, end mobile devices have more choices to connect to the backhaul core mesh network. Our idea is to make this selection seamless to user and let the device and network decide which interface should be used during a certain session. To have an updated list of network access available at the backhaul, each end device scans the network continuously and updates its available network interfaces database. To select an interface, QoS requirements of application along with end device capabilities, such as remaining battery power, is evaluated by the hybrid MAC against the capabilities of available interfaces and an interface which satisfies these requirements is selected. D. Heterogeneous multi-radio graphs and routing Extending the work of [17], we formulate radio graphs which capture the heterogeneity of radios on mesh nodes having multiple radios with diverse ranges. As shown in Fig. 3, an edge between two nodes a and b is transformed into parallel edges to capture the heterogeneity of radios at these nodes. Let G (V, E) be the original graph of mesh backbone where V = {v1, v2, v3vn} represents nodes in the mesh network and E = {e1, e2, e3.en} are the links between nodes. A radio based graph GR (VR, ER) is a transformed form of the original mesh backbone graph G (V, E), which captures the heterogeneity and number of radios on mesh nodes. Vertices of radio graph represent radios on mesh nodes and edges are the communication links between compatible radios of two mesh nodes. We assume that mesh routers in tier-1 have all three radios

(WLAN, WPAN, WiMAX) while tier-2 and tier-3 mesh have two radios (WLAN and WiMAX), possibly multiple of these. This results in a point multiple-line graph due to the different range of these access technologies. As shown in Fig. 4, i V is the source mesh router while j V is the destination. Difference in range results in multiple paths from source node to destination gateway, some paths may bypass the intermediate nodes. Routing in such a heterogeneous environment is a non-trivial issue. Using the available interfaces, the most efficient path needs to be chosen for data transfer keeping in view the QoS requirements of the application. The possible solutions can consist of using the same interface along the whole source destination path or by using different interfaces depending on delay, capacity, energy utilization and quality of link. Let (i, j) be the source destination pair for which an optimal route is needed. Keeping in view the architecture proposed, there are many possible routes along the same path from i to j. Let (Ui, Vj) be a link between any two nodes. We define two types of connections. (U1, V1) is the WiMAX connection between these two nodes and (U2, V2) is the WLAN link between U and V. We apply the concept of relay nodes similar to that of OLSR [19]. Relay routers are three hops away from one another and have complete information of all their three hop neighbors. As shown in Fig. 4, nodes i, j, k,q are the relay routers inside the mesh backhaul.

Figure 3. Transformed multiple-line graphs

Figure 4. Optimal path discovery

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Routing information is exchanged between these relay routers via a dedicated WiMAX link. There are multiple heterogeneous and homogenous path combinations between a relay router and its neighbor routers. The path cost between any two nodes i, j can be represented by: L(i,j) = (min Di,j , max Bi,j) (1) Where Di, j is the delay associated with the link and Bi, j is the available bandwidth of link between i and j. The optimal paths from node i to its neighbors up to j can be found by using the Floyd-Warshall algorithm triple operation as: Optimal Path Algorithm for Heterogeneous Networks

L(i,j) min[L(i,j), L(i,k)+L(k,j)] for all i,j L(i,j)= if (i,j) ER for k=1 to 3 if(k= =1) L(i,a) min[ L(i1,a1,), L(i2,a2)] if(k = =2) L(i,b) min[ L(i1,b1), L(I,a)+ L(a1,b1), L(i,a)+L(a2,b2)] if(k= =3) L(i,j) min[ L(i1,j1), L(i,a)+L(a1,j1), L((i,a)+L(a1,b1)+ L(b1,j1), L(i,a)+L(a1,b1)+ L(b2,j2), L(i,a)+L(a2,b2)+ L(b1,j1), L(i,a)+L(a2,b2)+ L(b2,j2)] next k
The output of this algorithm is the optimal path, based on our metric, from a relay node to all of its three hop neighbors. Relay nodes update each other regarding the optimal paths of their 3 hop neighbors. Each relay node diffuses this information up to three hop neighbors. When the system converges, each node has global knowledge of all links in the network and routing tables at each node can be computed by using the network level knowledge of all links by applying any shortest path algorithm. IV. MOBILITY MANAGEMENT AND HANDOVER MECHANISM IN HETEROGENEOUS MESH NETWORKS Equipped with multiple heterogeneous interfaces, there are two instances when an end device needs to switch interface. In the first case when a mobile device is connected to mesh router through a specific interface and the interface no longer satisfies the QoS requirements of the device or user application. This can happen when a devices battery goes down below a specific threshold and it is necessary to switch to another power efficient interface. Since this type of interface switch occurs locally without the mobility factor involved, we will call it a static interface switch as the point of attachment for the end device remains unchanged. Second type of interface switch occurs due to the mobility of end device. For example, a mobile device which is connected to mesh backhaul via a WPAN interface. When the user goes out of his/her office, it associates itself with another mesh

router through a WLAN interface. Further if the user goes out of campus, it may connect to mesh backhaul through WiMAX interface. In the above two cases, each device needs to actively scan the available network interfaces at the mesh backhaul and update their current states. We propose a similar solution as given in IEEE 802.21 [20] for media independent handover in IEEE 802.x networks interworking. As shown in Fig. 5a, each device actively scans the access network interfaces available at the mesh backhaul. This serves two purposes; first, it gives updated status information of the current interface and hence the access technology in use by the device. Second, it provides input to the decision block for interface switch. Network scanning and interface monitoring are two continuous processes. During the network access scan, information such as availability of a specific network interface, link quality, signal strength, data rate etc. can be obtained by the end device mobility management module and are updated regularly. The monitor and trigger modules constantly check the suitability of current interface with the application and end devices requirements. As shown in Fig. 5b, the flowchart shows the handover and interface switch mechanism.

Figure 5a . Mobility management framework

Figuire 5b. Handover mechanism

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[2]

Dx

Ax
[3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

Figure 5 c. Interface switch threshold [8] [9]

During the monitor stage, the current interface in use by the end device is checked against the application and device requirements, represented by Dx and Ax respectively. When the capabilities reach a certain threshold (TH0), the monitor module switches to the trigger module. THc is the minimum threshold for any application or device to use this interface, as shown in Fig 5c, this is continuously monitored and when there is further fall below TH0, the handover mechanism switches to interface change mode. The time duration (t2-t1) should be enough to complete the handover seamlessly. As discussed earlier, two types of interface switching take place. One type is when the mobile device remains attached to the current mesh router but only changes its interface. The other type is when device actually moves away from the current mesh router and associates with another mesh router/mesh point in the same backhaul with a new interface. V. CONCLUSION Integrating multiple heterogeneous radios on mesh backhaul routers enormously increases overall system throughput, resilience and availability. In this paper, we proposed a novel heterogeneous wireless mesh network architecture in which three access technologies were integrated on mesh backhaul routers which divides and limits the user traffic in different tiers and thus improves overall system performance. Issues, which arise from such architecture, were identified at different protocol layers and possible solutions were presented. Multiple-line radio graphs were introduced for heterogeneous radio assignment. We proposed (i) An optimal path algorithm for efficient routing across heterogeneous interfaces, where the routing load is minimized by keeping the broadcasts limited through relay nodes and (ii) Media independent handover scheme for seamless interface switching of mobile and static end user devices. In our future work, routing, load balancing and fairness issues with cross layer optimization in heterogeneous mesh networks will be further investigated. REFERENCES
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