A Scalable Neighborhood Discovery Protocol for Infrastructure Wireless Mesh Networks

Infrastructure Wireless Mesh Networks (IWMNs) have emerged as a promising technology for dynamic selfconfigurable and self-healing networks that provide large coverage, connectivity and resilience based on routing capabilities supported by their constituting nodes. In order to scale up IWMNs, it is an interesting approach to split routing capabilities into a layered routing architecture, in which the base layer is defined by a neighborhood discovery protocol employed to detect the presence and status of neighbor nodes. In such a context, this paper presents SNDP, a scalable neighborhood discovery protocol that has been specifically designed for IWMNs. SNDP adopts a hybrid, collaborative signaling strategy, in which different types of nodes adopt distinct signaling approaches that work together to manage neighborhood concerns. By reducing signaling load, power consumption and neighborhood discovery time, SNDP has the potential to become a better choice than the current work-in progress proposed by the IETF MANET working group.