Context-based wireless mesh networks: a case for network virtualization

摘要

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have gained increasing attention as an attractive means to provide connectivity in complement to access as offered by regular Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Such a grass-root technique, however, often suffers from detrimental operating conditions and poor quality. Network virtualization, on the other hand, has been widely advocated as a possibility to overcome what has often been referred to as the ossification of the Internet. Combining the concept of network virtualization with WMN technology, therefore, appears to be promising and desirable. It is envisioned that well managed multiple Virtual Networks (VNs) may overcome shortcomings of WMNs on the one hand, and extend the reach of the Internet beyond its current confinement into the realm and control of the user on the other hand. In this paper, we argue for a context-based approach for an effective means to extend multi-VNs from the Internet domain into WMN environments. We describe both mobility and preferences as context models in order to create virtualized WMNs based on these types of context models. As a result, it is envisioned to achieve a comprehensive connectivity coverage, accompanied by high assurance in network quality. We further present a distributed solution to manage multi-VNs, and a mobility-aware context use case to demonstrate the usefulness of our approach.