Mobility Management in Wireless Mesh Networks

Over the past few years, wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged to become a ubiquitous solution for providing wireless access at lower cost, greater flexibility, higher reliability and performance compared to conventional wireless local area network (WLANs). As the demand for delay sensitive real-time applications such as VOIP and streaming media grows, mobility management is becoming a critical function of WMN. Although Mobility management schemes designed for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) and traditional fixed networks might be useful for WMNs, mobility management in WMNs is still an active research issue because of the special properties of WMNs. This chapter focuses on the mobility management in wireless mesh networks, which takes into account the unreliability of wireless mesh links and other special properties of WMNs. The chapter began by discussing the special properties of WMNs and the general concepts of mobility management, and then gives an overview of the mobility management problems in wireless mesh networks (layer 2 handoff, vertical handoff and cross layer design, etc.) with some potential solutions.