A Low Overhead Architecture for Infrastructure-based Wireless Mesh Networks

Infrastructure-based Wireless Mesh Networks are envisioned as a cheap, flexible and appropriate technology to expand the radio coverage of network service providers and to create community networks. In this paper we propose a low overhead architecture which offers Internet connectivity and efficient communications among the nodes inside the mesh. Our solution enhances the performance of the Dynamic MANET On-demand (DYMO) Routing protocol with the use of multipoint relays to minimize the protocol overhead. In addition, a novel approach which takes advantage of the fixed network for communications inside the mesh is presented. The performance of the overall architecture is analyzed by means of simulation.