IP address assignment in wireless mesh networks

摘要

In recent years cheap Internet access has become increasingly popular within the industrialized countries. Especially in the age of Web 2.0, where popular Internet applications begin to dominate computer use, ubiquitous network access is more important than ever. A new class of networks aim to satisfy the demand for high bandwidth, low-cost, and ubiquitous Internet access: wireless mesh networks (WMNs). However, in order to reach a greater market penetration a fundamental factor must yet to be addressed: the ease of use. Except for small networks, manual configuration is infeasible, so robust autoconfiguration mechanisms are needed. To address this shortcoming of complicated setup procedures we introduce and evaluate a novel autoconfiguration protocol for WMN: the Dynamic WMN Configuration Protocol (DWCP). It deals with the assignment of unique addresses, the management of free and assigned addresses, the autonomous reaction to failures, and features support of conventional Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) clients. It is specifically suitable for large installations and was deployed and evaluated in a real test-bed.