Optimizing Access Radio in Multi-Radio Mesh Network

MPhil Thesis Defence


Title: "Optimizing Access Radio in Multi-Radio Mesh Network"

By

Mr. Christopher Lim


Abstract

Today, IEEE 802.11-based Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs, also known 
as WiFi) are widely deployed. WLANs are being deployed at everywhere, from 
home to office, from enterprise to city wide. Traditionally WLAN are 
operated in infrastructure mode, where all wireless stations are connected 
to an access point (AP). The range of WLAN is limited by the range of the 
wireless medium.

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are the new trends in the wireless world, it 
extend the reach of WLAN by connecting individual WLANs together 
wirelessly forming a much larger coverage. This thesis, we describes the 
design, implementation and evaluation of a hierarchical multi-radio mesh 
network named Mesh Assisted Channel Assignment (MACA), which normal 
unmodified 802.11 clients connected to the meshAP via access radio, and 
the meshAP communicate with each other via mesh radio.

Most of the current research efforts are focus on the performance of the 
mesh radio, while in MACA, we try to utilize the information among mesh 
nodes to help the access radio channel selection. A key feature of MACA is 
a new metric to estimate accurately the channel condition under the 
multi-radio mesh network, the Effective Channel Air Time (ECAT). ECAT can 
estimate channel conditional correctly when there are traffic in the 
overlapping channels. Experiments on are being carried out on the MACA 
implementation to show the effectiveness of the proposed metric and 
scheme.


Date:				Monday, 2 February 2009

Time:				10:00a.m.-12:00noon

Venue:				Room 4480
 				Lifts 25-26

Committee Members:		Dr. Qian Zhang (Supervisor)
 				Dr. Shing-Chi Cheung (Chairperson)
 				Dr. Lin Gu


**** ALL are Welcome ****