We propose and analyze a novel location management scheme for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) called Dual-region Mobility Management (DrMoM). The basic design concept of DrMoM is to use local regions to complement existing location services in MANETs that assign home regions to mobile nodes and have mobile nodes in the home region of a mobile node serve as location servers for that node. DrMoM is based on the design notion of integrated mobility and service management for network cost minimization. Specifically, unlike existing location services that define the home region size statically at design time for all mobile users, DrMoM dynamically determines the optimal home region size and local region size per mobile user based on mobility and service characteristics of individual mobile nodes to minimize the overall network cost incurred by location management and data packet delivery. We develop a performance model to derive the optimal values of these two key design parameters under which the overall network cost incurred by DrMoM is minimized. Through a comparative performance study, we show that DrMoM outperforms a well-known scheme called SLURP based on static home regions as well as a region-based location management scheme called RUDLS which claims to outperform contemporary region-based location management schemes.

We propose and analyze LMMesh: a routing-based location management scheme with pointer forwarding for wireless mesh networks. LMMesh integrates routing-based location update and pointer forwarding by exploiting the advantages of both methods, while avoiding their drawbacks. It considers the effect of the integration on the overall network cost incurred by location management and packet delivery. By exploring the tradeoff between the service cost for packet delivery and the signaling cost for location management, LMMesh identifies the optimal protocol setting that minimizes the overall network cost on a per-user basis for each individual mesh client, when given a set of parameter values characterizing the specific mobility and service characteristics of the mesh client. We develop an analytical model based on stochastic Petri net techniques for analyzing the performance of LMMesh and a computational procedure for calculating the overall network cost. Through a comparative performance study, we show that LMMesh outperforms both pure routing-based location management schemes and pure pointer forwarding schemes, as well as traditional tunnel-based location management schemes.

We propose and analyze a hierarchical agent-based secure multicast (HASM) algorithm for efficiently supporting secure mobile multicast in wireless mesh networks, with design considerations given to minimize the overall network cost incurred by multicast packet delivery, mobility management, security key management, and group membership maintenance. HASM dynamically maintains a group of multicast agents running on mesh routers for integrated mobility and multicast service management and leverages a hierarchical multicast structure for efficient multicast packet delivery. The regional service size of each multicast agent is a key design parameter. We demonstrate via model-based analysis that their exists an optimal regional service size that minimizes the overall communication cost. Through a comparative performance study, we demonstrate that HASM under optimal settings significantly outperforms traditional algorithms based on shortest-path trees and static agent-based multicasting extended with mobility management and security support.

We propose efficient mobility management schemes based on pointer forwarding for wireless mesh networks (WMNs) with the objective to reduce the overall network traffic incurred by mobility management and packet delivery. The proposed schemes are per-user-based, i.e., the optimal threshold of the forwarding chain length that minimizes the overall network traffic is dynamically determined for each individual mobile user, based on the user's specific mobility and service patterns. We develop analytical models based on stochastic Petri nets to evaluate the performance of the proposed schemes. We demonstrate that there exists an optimal threshold of the forwarding chain length, given a set of parameters characterizing the specific mobility and service patterns of a mobile user. We also demonstrate that our schemes yield significantly better performance than schemes that apply a static threshold to all mobile users. A comparative analysis shows that our pointer forwarding schemes outperform routing-based mobility management protocols for WMNs, especially for mobile Internet applications characterized by large traffic asymmetry for which the downlink packet arrival rate is much higher than the uplink packet arrival rate.

In this paper, we propose and analyze APPCCM: an adaptive per-user per-object cache consistency management scheme for mobile Internet client-server applications in wireless mesh networks (WMNs). The objective of the proposed scheme is two-fold: to speedup data access and to mitigate the performance bottleneck at WMN gateways. In our proposed adaptive scheme, a data object can be cached at the mesh client (MC) directly or at a mesh router (MR) dynamically selected by APPCCM, such that the overall network cost incurred for the WMN to process the MC's mobility and data access/update events is minimized. APPCCM is adaptive, per-user and per-object as the decision of where to cache a data object accessed by an MC depends on the MC's mobility and object access/update characteristics, and the WMN conditions. We demonstrate via model-based analysis that APPCCM outperforms non-adaptive schemes that always cache a data object at the MC, or at the MC's current serving MR for cache consistency management in WMNs.