A Dynamic Hierarchical Mobility Management Protocol for Next Generation Wireless Metropolitan Area Networks

Wi-Fi mesh networks and WiMAX are two new emerging wireless access technologies for the delivery of broadband services to mobile users in the metropolitan area. To take advantage of the strengths of these two, we propose a novel architecture for next generation wireless metropolitan area networks. In this architecture, no wired backhaul connections for Wi-Fi mesh portals are needed, which considerably reduces the deployment cost and at the same time improves the system scalability. Due to the unique feature of wireless mesh networks which is a part of the architecture, previously proposed mobility management protocol can not work properly in this network environment. We propose a hierarchical mobility management scheme for mobile stations to maintain network connectivity while roaming within the Wi-Fi mesh networks. In this scheme, the dynamic forwarding chain is used to reduce the signalling traffic involved in the mobility management including registration and handoff procedures. The results of the performance evaluation justified the benefits of our proposed mechanism.