Network Engineering and Traffic Forwarding (NETF): An Integrated Design for Inter-Gateway QoS Handoffs in Infrastructure Wireless Mesh Networks

Inter-domain handoffs in wireless mesh networks (WMNs) must evaluate the resource conditions of the target handoff domain in order to make QoS handoff decisions. Performance degradations to either or both handoff and existing QoS-aware traffic occur when resources on gateways and mesh routers in the handoff domain are over-utilized, while on the other hand, global resources across domains might still be underutilized. In this paper, we introduce a QoS-handoff framework for WMNs which includes 1) a resilient mesh architecture that offers dynamic gateway selection for inter-gateway handoffs under the assumption that different gateways belong to different domains and 2) a resilient forwarding scheme that allows intermediate mesh routers to make resilient next-hop decisions for traffic forwarding. With an integrated design and inter-dependency linkage of network architecture and traffic management, handoff resource utilization across domains can be realized. QoS requirements for both handoff and existing traffic can be achieved before and after handoffs in the inter-gateway WMN environment.