Scalable and Resilient Wireless Mesh Network Design

Wireless Mesh networks are ad hoc wireless networks made up of special nodes that automatically communicate with each other to create a single, scalable wireless network. A node can send and receive data, while also serving as a router to relay information to any other node within its area of coverage. A mesh network is intelligent and self-organizing, automatically adjusting and updating the most efficient routing patterns through the network, as nodes or Internet gateways are added or removed. As compared to one-to-one and one-to-many networks, mesh networks allow for better scalability and reliability, and significant cost reduction. The objective of this work is to develop optimal network topology, algorithms and protocols to support reliable transmissions while minimizing the network cost and impoving transmission efficiency. We have developed unified MAC and routing framework for constructing meshed networks over multi-channel and multi-interface nodes, and we have shown tremendous throughput improvement. Our current work is on exploiting the current wireless 802.11 and the recent 802.16 (WiMAX) technologies to construct reliable community networks and wireless backhaul networks, and to support QoS for both voice and data.