The scalability of the hybrid protocol in wireless mesh network 802.11s

Abstract

One of the attractive features of the wireless mesh network is its ability to scale to larger covered area by simply adding more wireless routers. This scalability increases the average number of hops from source to destination and hence it may affect the network performance in terms of delay and throughput. Many solutions have been proposed for wireless mesh networks. Among them the 802.11s proposes a Hybrid Wireless mesh Protocol HWMP. This protocol combines the functionalities of the Radio Metric Ad-hoc On demand Distance Vector protocol RM-AODV and the Tree Based Routing protocol TBR. In this work we propose to evaluate the scalability of the HWMP using network simulator NS2. For this purpose we used a grid wide network topologies with n*n static Mesh Point MP routers. The simulation results show a very interesting result related to the loss rate, path establishment delay, network throughput and signaling overhead.