Routing protocols for mesh networks with mobility support

Abstract

We study traffic routing in wireless mesh networks, where most of the nodes are fixed and few of them are mobile. We assume real-time multimedia stream communications between a fixed server and mobile nodes. In particular, through simulation we investigate the performance of the BATMAN protocol and compare it against that of some of the most representative schemes for routing in ad hoc and mesh networks. We find that BATMAN performs well for uplink traffic transfers (from the mobile to the fixed server), but yields poor results in presence of downlink traffic. We therefore analyze the protocol behavior and solve its shortcomings by proposing a modified version of the scheme named smart window (sw-) BATMAN. Our results show that sw-BATMAN outperforms the other schemes in many scenarios of practical interest, thus emerging as a good candidate for routing in wireless mesh networks with mobility support.