On achieving high performance wireless mesh networks with data fusion

Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) supports various types of mesh clients such as sensor networks, cellular, 802.11/e Wireless LAN, etc. In this case, it needs to be suitably organized and adopt well-known or newly proposed algorithm to guarantee high and reliable mesh performance. This paper applies RObust Header Compression (ROHC) originate from cellular data network plus packet aggregation to WMNs when mesh clients generate smallsize fusion data, i.e., sensor (delivered by UDP) and voice over IP (VOIP) data. We preliminarily analyze ROHC and packet aggregation improve UDP throughput and the number of supported voice calls. However, the improvement does not include a processor's processing overhead for ROHC and packet aggregation, which is examined by measuring ROHC execution time from Intel Pentium 4 and RouterBOARD, and applying the results into NS-2 simulations. The results indicate UDP and voice performance are seriously affected by the processing overhead. As a solution for the performance degradation, we introduce a hardware design for the two algorithms. By using Systeme Hardware Description Language (HDL), we first design hardware specification composed of 1Ghz master clock and 333Mhz BUS system. Then, we integrate the hardware model into previous NS-2 network model, and propose profile-based network/hardware co-simulation method which gives insight how to investigate real-timing characteristics of the hardware model in the view of network behaviors.