Self-Reconfigurable Wireless Mesh Networks

During their lifetime, multihop wireless mesh networks (WMNs) experience frequent link failures caused by channel interference, dynamic obstacles, and/or applications´ bandwidth demands. These failures cause severe performance degradation in WMNs or require expensive manual network management for their real-time recovery. This paper presents an autonomous network reconfiguration system (ARS) that enables a multiradio WMN to autonomously recover from local link failures to preserve network performance. By using channel and radio diversities in WMNs, ARS generates necessary changes in local radio and channel assignments in order to recover from failures. Next, based on the thus-generated configuration changes, the system cooperatively reconfigures network settings among local mesh routers. ARS has been implemented and evaluated extensively on our IEEE 802.11-based WMN test-bed as well as through ns2-based simulation. Our evaluation results show that ARS outperforms existing failure-recovery schemes in improving channel-efficiency by more than 90% and in the ability of meeting the applications´ bandwidth demands by an average of 200%.