This paper proposes mobility-enabled and loop-free
extensions to the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) for wireless ad
hoc environments, taking into account requirements such as loop avoidance, root selection, ability to deal with interference, path loss or multipath fading, all without requiring to modify the
existing protocol stack. Our approach is compliant with IEEE
802.11 networks and considers that mobile nodes constantly join
and leave the range of each other due to their unpredicted
movements, often changing the network topology. This implies
that coherent information must be forwarded between nodes
in order to keep their distributed knowledge synchronized,
to allow the spanning tree topology maintenance and avoid
or remove undesirable loops in multi-hop paths. The results
obtained through simulation show that WSTP ensures a lower
distance between the nodes and the root when compared to an
approach that performs associations based on the first contact,
and therefore, it provides a lower resource consumption and
lower delay in the communications.