Chapter 16 - Wireless Mesh Networks

Summary

Introduction

Wireless mesh networking is rapidly gaining in popularity with a variety of users: from municipalities to enterprises, from telecom service providers to public safety and military organizations. This increasing popularity is based on two basic facts: ease of deployment and increase in network capacity expressed in bandwidth per footage.

So what is a mesh network? Simply put, it is a set of fully interconnected network nodes that support traffic flows between any two nodes over one or more paths or routes. Adding wireless to the above brings the additional ability to maintain connectivity while the network nodes are in motion. The Internet itself can be viewed as the largest scale mesh network formed by hundreds of thousands of nodes connected by fiber or other means, including, in some cases, wireless links.

In this chapter we will look more closely into wireless mesh networks.

History

Mesh networking goes back a long time; in fact tactical networks of the military have relied on stored and forward nodes with multiple interconnections since the early days of electronic communications. The advent of packet switching allowed the forwarding function of these networks to be buried in the lower layers of communication systems, which opened up many new possibilities of improving the capacity and redundancy of these networks. Attracted by the inherent survivability of mesh networks, the US Defense research agency DARPA has funded a number of projects aimed at creating a variety of high-speed mesh networking technologies that support troop deployment on the battlefield as well as low speed, high survival sensor networks.