Wireless Mesh Networks: Architectures and Protocols

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.