PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2009, Engineering : Computer Science and Engineering

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are one of the upcoming technologies which envision providing broadband internet access to users any where any time. WMNs comprise of Internet Gateways (IGWs) and Mesh Routers (MRs). They seamlessly extend the network connectivity to Mesh Clients (MCs) as end users by forming a wireless backbone that requires minimal infrastructure. For WMNs, frequent link quality fluctuations, excessive load on selective links, congestion, and limited capacity due to half-duplex nature of radios are some key limiting factors that hinder their deployment. Also, other problems such as unfair channel access, improper buffer management, and irrational routing choices are impeding the successful large scale deployment of mesh networks. Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning and scalability in terms of supporting large number of users with decent bandwidth are other important issues.In this dissertation, we examine some of the aforementioned problems in WMNs and propose novel algorithms to solve them. We find that the proposed solutions enhance the network's performance significantly. In particular, we provide a traffic differentiation methodology, Dual Queue Service Differentiation (DQSD), which helps in fair throughput distribution of network traffic regardless of spatial location of its nodes. We next focus on managing the IGWs in WMNs since they are the potential bottleneck candidates due to huge volume of traffic that has to flow through them. To address this issue, we propose a load balancing protocol, LoaD BALancing (LDBAL), which efficiently distributes the traffic load among a given set of IGWs. We then delve into the aspects of load balancing and traffic distribution over multiple traffic paths in WMNs. To achieve this, we propose a novel Adaptive State-based Multipath Routing Protocol (ASMRP) that provides reliable and robust performance in WMNs. We also employ four-radio architecture for MRs, which allows them to communicate over multiple radios t (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Dharma Agrawal DSc (Committee Chair); Kenneth Berman PhD (Committee Member); Yiming Hu PhD (Committee Member); Kelly Cohen PhD (Committee Member); Chia Han PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Computer Science