Research On Reliability Technology Of Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN), as the last hop connecting method to Internet, has come into market nowadays. In WLAN, terminals access Internet through Access Point (AP) which connects to wire networks directly. But the coverage of WLAN is very small, and the cost of deployment is sill too expensive. Therefore, in order to extend the coverage of wireless access networks and reduce the deployment cost, Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) is proposed.First, the thesis gives an overview of WMN technology, and describes its characteristics and related technologies. Then the paper discusses the effect of reliability to the overall performance of network, and analyzes the problems and challenges of each network architecture level.In the following part, a method of computing the 2-terminal reliability of the backbone of WMN is proposed. The proposed method has considered the reliability of the mesh routers and wireless links between the mesh routers in the backbone of WMN, so it is suitable for measuring the 2-terminal reliability between the communication nodes in the actual network environment.Finally, a multi-path routing algorithm is given, which is based on link-independence technology, and is applicable for backbone of WMN. Through comparing with other related protocols by simulation, it is provided that the performance of the WMN has been improved.