ConT: A contention-based time division scheme for handoff support in single-radio wireless mesh networks

Handoff delay is a key metric to evaluate the performance of wireless mesh networks (WMNs). Since data packets and handoff signaling packets are transmitted on the same backbone channel in single-channel single-radio based WMNs, the channel contentions between data and signaling packets often lead to long signaling packet queueing delay and channel access delay. Therefore, the handoff performance is largely determined by the backbone data traffic volume. However, this important issue is ignored by existing handoff solutions in multi-hop WMNs. In this paper, we consider to reduce the handoff delay in single-backbone-channel-based WMNs from a different perspective and propose a contention-based time division (ConT) scheme to shorten the channel access delay and queueing delay of handoff signaling packets over multi-hop wireless links. Simulation results show that the multi-hop handoff performance can be improved significantly without undermining the data throughput by our proposed ConT scheme.