On construction of the virtual backbone in wireless mesh networks

This paper deals with the selection of backbone nodes among end-user nodes in the wireless mesh networks. Although current IEEE 802.11 standards does not allow direct client-client or wireless AP-AP communication in the infrastructure mode, new concepts on mesh networks is arising in which all types of wireless links (i.e. AP-AP, client-client and client-AP) can be formed. This leads to the connectivity between nodes across the entire network region through multi-hopping. In this context, we propose a backbone selection algorithm such that best links and nodes are used with the connectivity being preserved as long as possible. We present the preliminary simulation result of our scheme in terms of packet delivery ratio and energy consumption.