A Simple yet Effective Scheme for the Maintenance of Proxy Information in IEEE 802.11s Wireless Mesh Networks

According to the IEEE 802.11s draft standard, the mesh STA may maintain proxy information on STAs that are associated with a collocated access point or are behind a collocated portal. The proxy information plays a very important role in wireless mesh networks for additional delays may be introduced owing to the absence of proxy information during frame forwarding. While the method for maintaining proxy information is beyond the scope of the standard, two basic mechanisms had been integrated in the early drafts of IEEE 802.11s -the proxy registration procedure and the associated station discovery protocol. The two mechanisms, however, suffer from serious drawbacks including the high control overhead, the ineffective maintenance of proxy information, and disregarding the internetworking among multiple mesh networks connected through IEEE 802 LANs. In this paper, a simple yet effective scheme is proposed for the maintenance of the proxy information. The proposed scheme can be applied to any bridged LAN connected with a number of mesh networks and IEEE 802 LANs. Analytic results show that the proposed scheme outperforms over the proxy registration procedure and the associated station discovery protocol in terms of frame forwarding delay, control overhead, and the aggregated proxy information size.