The IEEE 802.11 standard defines a medium access control protocol for wireless local area networks (WLANs). In typical WLANs, access points (APs) are connected with one another in a wired manner. As a way to loosen this restriction wireless mesh networks (WMNs), which are rather independent of a backbone infrastructure, is emerging. Due to their inherent characteristics unlike ad hoc networks, it is unreasonable that the ad hoc network routing protocols are directly applied for the WMNs without any modification. The tree-based routing protocol (TRP) defined in the IEEE 802.11s is one of the routing protocols used in WMNs. The TRP, however, forwards data on the only one active path. In this paper, we propose a flexible tree-based routing protocol with a mesh relaying node (TRP-MRN) in WMNs. The TRP-MRN provides a concurrent multi-path establishment algorithm. We analyze the end-to-end delay of the TRP and the TRP-MRN and show that the TRP-MRN can effectively reduce the end-to-end delay and provide alternative routes via simulations.
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