Mobile-Agent-Based Handoff in Wireless Mesh Networks: Architecture and Call Admission Control

The wireless mesh network (WMN) has recently emerged as a promising technology for next-generation wireless networking. In the WMN, it is crucial to support mobile users roaming around the network without service interruption. This consideration motivates us to develop an efficient fast handoff approach using distributed computing technology. Particularly, we propose a mobile agent (MA)-based handoff architecture for the WMN, where each mesh client has an MA residing on its registered mesh router to handle the handoff signaling process. To guarantee quality of service (QoS) and achieve differentiated priorities during the handoff, we develop a proportional threshold structured optimal effective bandwidth (PTOEB) policy for call admission control (CAC) on the mesh router, as well as a genetic algorithm (GA)-based approximation approach for the heuristic solution. The simulation study shows that the proposed CAC scheme can obtain a satisfying tradeoff between differentiated priorities and the statistical effective bandwidth in a WMN handoff environment.