ABSTRACT
Multihop wireless communication networks have been of increasing interest over the last decade. Two main types of such networks have emerged: mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) and wireless mesh networks (WMNs). MANETs are infrastructure-less, nonhierarchical wireless networks where all network entities can move and function as routers and discover and maintain routes to other entities in the network. On the other hand, WMNs typically have a hierarchical structure and are supported by an infrastructure. Furthermore, the functionalities of the network entities may vary significantly across the layers of the hierarchical network structure. While MANETs have been historically envisioned to serve very specialized applications, such as battlefields and emergency situations, WMNs have inspired numerous general applications ranging from broadband home networking to community networks to high-speed metropolitan area networks (MANs) [1–3]. Particularly, large-scale WMNs with infrastructure support have been considered as an affordable and scalable solution to provide broadband packet data communications across wide geographic areas, thanks to their inherent advantages such as robustness to node failures, ease of deployment and maintenance, and low initial deployment cost [1–3].
