An efficient cooperation of on-demand and proactive modes in Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol

Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol (HWMP) in IEEE 802.11s provides two routing modes, on-demand and proactive, for WLAN mesh networks. Although the on-demand routing mode always provides the optimum routing paths for data transmission, the initial latency can be very high when communicating with a destination in an external network. On the other hand, the proactive routing mode shows low initial latency when communicating with a destination in an external network, but the data transmission throughput can decrease when communicating with a destination in the same mesh network. This paper proposes an efficient cooperation method of two routing modes, taking advantage of the merits of each routing mode to overcome their faults. To evaluate the performance of the proposed cooperation method, we implemented HWMP on a testbed and performed experiments. The experimental results showed that the proposed cooperation method overcomes the faults of each routing mode and searches for the optimum routing paths quickly and efficiently; it always has the lower initial latency and higher data transmission throughput compared with the on-demand and proactive routing modes.