IEEE 802.11s: WLAN mesh standardization and high performance extensions

In recent years, remarkable market competition and economy of scale has resulted in the price erosion of wireless devices for consumer electronics. Especially for wireless data networks, IEEE project 802 provides the standards for mass markets. With ever-growing usage, the demand for ubiquitous wireless networks increases. However, the achievable data rates decrease with the increasing distance of client devices from the infrastructure, and a sufficiently dense deployment of infrastructure devices is required to fulfill the customers' demand for broadband access. Today, these infrastructure devices rely on a wired backbone for background services; however, to reduce their costly deployment, they should interconnect wirelessly. In this case, devices mutually serve as wireless relays that forward and route packets over multiple wireless hops, and wireless mesh networks come into existence. In this article we provide an overview of wireless mesh networking and provide insights into the related standardization efforts in IEEE 802. For a more in-depth analysis, we focus on the draft WLAN mesh standard IEEE 802.11s and identify challenges for medium access control in multihop communication. Derived from our proposal to 802.1 Is, the current draft incorporates an optional medium access scheme that circumvents a performance gap. By means of simulations, we compare the performance of both solutions and provide an outlook for future 802 wireless systems that will be more reliable.