On Redundant Multipath Operating System Support for Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Abstract-Low-cost wireless routers are changing the way people connect to the Internet. They are also very cheap, albeit quite limited, Linux boxes. These attributes make them ideal candidates for wireless mesh routers. This paper presents a minimally invasive mechanism for redundant multipath routing in kernel-space to achieve high reliability with high throughput in a mesh network. This service is essential for achieving fast, lossless handoff as mobile devices roam throughout the wireless mesh coverage area. However, redundant multipath is not natively supported by current operating systems, limiting the routing mechanisms that can be used in these networks to user-level implementations, which can greatly degrade performance.We show an architecture that integrates this mechanism in a wireless mesh system, resulting in a high-throughput 802.11 mesh network with fast handoff over low-cost routers.

Real-time video streaming over multipath in multi-hop wireless networks

“…Surprisingly, in all the scenarios, TCP streaming performs poorer with multiple paths than with a single path, which would result in worse video quality in the receiver side given the more frequent frame drops and pauses. This challenges the conventional belief that bandwidth aggregation from multiple path routing is beneficial [1]. A closer look suggests that these existing multipath protocols are mainly designed for UDP, with few explicit optimizations for TCP streaming.…”

“…A typical example is AOMDV [20], which extends the ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) single path routing protocol to compute multiple disjoint paths using controlled flooding. Recently, there have also been efforts toward multipath routing in multi-hop wireless networks [1,28].…”

“…Through bandwidth aggregation, it enhances routing robustness and decreases delay and packet loss. A series of multipath protocols have been proposed for video streaming [2,13,24] and for multi-hop wireless routing [1,28]. Yet the interaction and the best combination among them are still unclear, particularly for TCP-based streaming.…”

Path diversified retransmission for TCP over wireless mesh networks

“…Multiple path transmission could obtain higher aggregated bandwidth and potentially decreases delay and packet loss. WMN is a typical network offering serval paths from a source to a destination and a series of multipath protocols have been proposed for WMNs routing [6,59,69]. Yet the interaction and the best combination between the transport protocols and the multipath routing protocols are still unclear, particularly for TCP.…”

“…Recently, there have also been efforts toward multipath routing in WMNs [6,59,69], benefiting from multi-radio, multi-channel, multi-gateway and opportunistic transmission additionally. It is believed that multipath routing would be better to incorporate QoS attributes [55].…”