Enhanced Topolgoy Formation Protocol for IEEE 802.11 WLAN based Mesh Networks

Abstract

This paper deals with the topology formation schemes in the IEEE 802.11 based wireless mesh network. The recent standardization effort for specifying a wireless distribution system based on wireless mesh networking, namely the IEEE 802.11 s Task Group, has proposed the "Simple Channel Unification Protocol" that coalesce all nodes into to a single channel. We show that protocols as such without exposition of the topological information may take more time to converge and have higher message overhead. We propose an enhancement of the existing protocol to reduce message and time required to generate a single unified graph in WLAN-based mesh networks. We performed simulations using the network simulator, ns-2 and compared with the existing solution. The preliminary results show that our scheme performs better in terms of the message overhead as well as the convergence time.