A Brief Journey through “Wireless Mesh Networks: Architectures and Protocols” Ekram Hossain, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada Kin Leung, Imperial College, London, United Kingdom Introduction Wireless mesh networking has emerged as a promising design paradigm for next gen eration wireless networks. Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) consist of mesh clients and mesh routers, where the mesh routers form a wireless infrastructure/backbone and interwork with the wired networks to provide multihop wireless Internet con nectivity to the mesh clients. Wireless mesh networking has emerged as one of the most promising concept for self organizing and auto con?gurable wireless network ing to provide adaptive and ?exible wireless Internet connectivity to mobile users. This concept can be used for different wireless access technologies such as IEEE 802. 11, 802. 15, 802. 16 based wireless local area network (WLAN), wireless per sonal area network (WPAN), and wireless metropolitan area network (WMAN) tech nologies, respectively. Potential application scenarios for wireless mesh networks in clude backhaul support for cellular networks, home networks, enterprise networks, community networks, and intelligent transport system networks. Development of wireless mesh networking technology has to deal with challenging architecture and protocol design issues, and there is an increasing interest on this technology among the researchers in both academia and industry. There are many on going research projects in different universities and industrial research labs. Also, many startup com panies are building mesh networking platforms based on off the shelf wireless access technologies and developing demanding applications and services.
Wireless Mesh Networks provides a unified view of the state-of-the-art achievements in the area of protocols and architectures for wireless mesh networking (WMN) technology. With contributions from leading experts in the field, the book covers aspects of analysis, design, deployment, and optimization of protocols and architectures for WMNs. In particular, the topics include challenges and issues in designing architectures and protocols for WMNs, medium access control and routing protocols for WMNs, resource allocation and scheduling in WMNs, cost optimization in WMN nodes using energy harvesting technologies, cross-layer design for WMNs, and security in WMNs.