1. Technical Field
This application relates generally to communications and in particular to systems and methods for distributed wireless networks.
2. Description of Related Art
This section describes related art, and accordingly, the statements in this section are not admissions of prior art.
Communication systems are known to support wireless and wire lined communications between wireless and/or wire lined devices. Such communication systems range from national and/or international cellular telephone systems to the Internet to point-to-point wireless networks. The communication systems may operate in accordance with one or more communication standards. For instance, wireless communication systems may operate in accordance with one or more standards including, but not limited to, IEEE 802.11 standards, WiMAX, Bluetooth, advanced mobile phone services (AMPS), digital AMPS, global system for mobile communications (GSM), code division multiple access (CDMA), local multi-point distribution systems (LMDS), multi-channel-multi-point distribution systems (MMDS), and/or variations thereof.
Depending on the type of wireless communication system, a wireless device, such as a wireless local area network (WLAN) telephone, personal or laptop computer, smart tablet, camera, entertainment equipment, set-top box, two-way radio, personal digital assistant (PDA), etc. communicates directly or indirectly with other wireless devices. For direct communications (also known as point-to-point communications), the participating wireless devices tune their receivers and transmitters to the same channel or channels (e.g., one of the plurality of radio frequency (RF) carriers of the wireless communication system) and communicate over that channel(s). For indirect wireless communications, a wireless device communicates directly with an associated access point (e.g., for an 802.11 type WLAN) via an assigned channel.
To complete a communication connection between wireless devices, the associated access points communicate with each other directly or through wireless local area network (WLAN) controllers. A typical wireless network architecture restricts the location of WLAN controllers in a same mobility domain to a single layer 2 network. This restriction allows WLAN controllers to discover other WLAN controllers in the same mobility domain using layer 2 broadcast protocols within the single layer 2 network. A more flexible solution is needed to provide for more distributed wireless network architectures.