Connectivity Maintenance Extensions to IEEE 802.11s MAC Layer in ns-3

Abstract

With the proliferation of IoT devices and their communication standards, we have been witnessing an increase in their meshing capabilities to enable coordination and cooperation. Such coordination, however, requires constant connectivity among the nodes when they are mobile. To efficiently maintain this connectivity, there have been different solutions in the past. However, none of them were incorporated into existing mesh standards. In this paper, we implemented a connectivity maintenance protocol within the IEEE 802.11s mesh standard which is available under ns-3. The connectivity maintenance was based on connected dominating set (CDS) paradigm and implemented at the MAC layer for faster processing. Under the 802.11s HWMP module, we introduced a new packet and a class to be able to compute the CDS of a given network. The implementation results indicate that the CDS at the MAC layer could be computed almost as fast as a centralized approach.