Dynamic Virtual Backbone Management for Service Discovery in Wireless Mesh Networks

This paper proposes a cross-layer service discovery architecture for wireless mesh networks where wireless mesh routers dynamically establish a virtual backbone. The mesh nodes use an automatic reorganization mechanism to be adaptive to the current network structure and stability. If the network is unstable, the mesh nodes operate in ad-hoc mode and use service discovery messages which are encapsulated in OLSR broadcast packets. If the mesh network becomes more stable, some nodes are elected as supernodes and establish a virtual backbone with associated clients. This architecture is based on a (fc, r) -distance multiple dominating set algorithm, which means that each node is either a supernode or is dominated by r supernodes with a hop distance of k hops at the most. The measurements which are performed in the department's wireless mesh testbed are discussed with results and conclusions.