Virtual Home Region Multi-Hash Location Management Service (VIMLOC) for Large-Scale Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have recently received much attention not only from the research community, but also from municipalities or non-tech-savvy user communities willing to build their own all-wireless network. One of the factors that has helped in making WMNs become popular is the widespread availability of low-cost wireless equipment, and particularly, IEEE 802.11 WLAN equipment. However, making these WMNs operationally efficient is a challenging task. In this direction, there has been a lot of work on the research issues highlighted in (Akyildiz & Wang, 2005). Nevertheless, such research topic as mobility management did not receive as much attention as others (e.g., channel assignment or routing). In general, mobility management is split into two main functions, namely handoff management and location management. The former deals with maintaining the communication of the mobile node (MN) while (re-)attaching to a new attachment point, whilst the latter deals with locating the MN in the network when a new communication needs to be established. Related to mobility, and at an architectural level, a common belief in the research community is that, unlike in an IP context, node identifiers and addresses (i.e., the current location in the network of those nodes) should not be integrated into a single identifier. The main purpose of this is to enable designing efficient mobility management schemes, and as part of them, efficient location management schemes (location services). This is particularly challenging in large-scale WMNs, due to the state information that must be stored in the nodes and the associated control overhead sent through the network. Related to this, position-based (geographic) routing algorithms are expected to improve scalability of large