Facilitating the network entry and link establishment processes of IEEE 802.16 mesh networks

The IEEE 802.16 standard is a promising next-generation broadband technology. It contains two operational modes - PMP and mesh. The PMP mode defines one-hop communication between a base station (BS) and a subscriber station (SS), while the mesh mode allows traffic to be directly exchanged and forwarded among neighboring SSs. In the mesh mode, network initialization is composed of the network entry (NENT) and link establishment (LinkEst) processes. In this paper, we identify that the NENT process is prone to fail in dense networks and propose a solution to remedy this problem. Besides, we propose an extension to the LinkEst process to improve its efficiency. Both proposals are compatible with the current standard. Our simulation results show that our solution to the NENT process can on average increase the success rate by 22.5%, and our extension to the LinkEst process can on average speed up the process by 2.57 times.