Towards modeling and verifying Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) is an emerging wireless technology which attracts more and more the attention not only of service providers and enterprises, but also researchers and academicians. In this paper, we are interested by the specification and the analysis of the Channel Assignment process to improve WMNs capacities during the routing process. We give an algorithmic solution showing how to bind each radio interface to a channel, while maintaining network connectivity, in order to reduce the interference problem. Since traditional analysis approaches, based on simulation and test bed experiments still remain limited, we lean on formal methods to give a precise semantics to Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) and verify formally the suggested protocol. We combine logical reflection of Maude language and hierarchical structure of the Bigraphical Reactive Systems for modeling and analyzing WMNs. We define a bigraphical model having two separate roots. Networks and their paths are represented as nodes of the topology root, and channels with their eventual interferences represent the sharing nodes belonging to another root. Besides, parametric reaction rules define possible evolution and reconfiguration of these WMN entities. This obtained model is finally executed and analyzed under Maude system.