ReLoAD: Resilient Location Area Design for Internet-Based Infrastructure Wireless Mesh Networks

Location management in wireless networks serves the purpose of locating silently roaming mobile nodes (MNs) prior to establishing new communications. However, existing fixed location area (LA) designs and dynamic location management schemes proposed for cellular and wireless local area networks are not applicable to Internet-based infrastructure wireless mesh networks (IiWMNs) because they do not consider the special properties of IiWMNs. In this paper, we propose a resilient location area design (ReLoAD) for IiWMNs. Under ReLoAD, the formation of LAs can adapt to the changes of both paging load and service load of existing active data sessions in the mesh backbone network. Hence, the proposed ReLoAD can balance the tradeoff between signaling overhead caused by the paging procedure and MN power consumption caused by the location update procedure while maintaining the required Quality of Service (QoS) performance of existing traffic. We evaluate the proposed ReLoAD using OPNET simulations. Simulation results reveal that the proposed ReLoAD is a scalable solution for location management in IiWMNs.