Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are emerging multi-hop wireless networks that can provide low cost, high speed Internet access for public and commercial applications. WMNs may be deployed as last-mile network access in many application areas such as community networks, intelligent transportation systems, municipality networks, public safety communications and surveillance systems. Despite research advances in the area in last few years and the network deployments, several research challenges still exist. Improving the network performance, efficient and fair use of the available resources requires further theoretical research and experimental studies. So far, research work focused mainly on the design of routing and Media Access Control protocols for pure ad hoc or infrastructure-based WMNs using strict layering approaches. Cross-layer design and optimization, intelligent techniques for data management, routing and mobility management schemes have not received much attention. In the past four years, my research team has been working on various topics in mobile and wireless multi-hop networks with focus on data management, mobility management, routing schemes and design of protocols for the integration of the Internet with mobile ad hoc networks. Our previous work has built a foundation for the work proposed in this research. The general objective of the current research work is to develop and evaluate data management techniques, routing and mobility management architectures, protocols and algorithms for infrastructure and hybrid WMNs. The three topics data management, routing and mobility management are basically related. Data management protocols and algorithms can exploit routing and mobility management architectures and protocols for their efficiency and effectiveness. Furthermore, with cross-layer design and optimizations approach, lower and upper layer protocol stack information can be exchanged to optimize the overall network performance. These topics will be studied using analytical models, simulation techniques, implementation test-beds and statistical analysis.