Mesh networking is a type of networking where each node must not only capture and disseminate its own data, but also serve as a relay for other nodes, that is, it must collaborate to propagate the data in the network.

A mesh network can be designed using a flooding technique or a routing technique. When using a routing technique, the message propagates along a path, by hopping from node to node until the destination is reached. To ensure all its paths' availability, a routing network must allow for continuous connections and reconfiguration around broken or blocked paths, using self-healing algorithms. A mesh network whose nodes are all connected to each other is a fully connected network. Mesh networks can be seen as one type of ad hoc network. Mobile ad hoc network

Mobile ad hoc network

A mobile ad-hoc network is a self-configuring infrastructureless network of mobile devices connected by wireless links. ad hoc is Latin and means "for this purpose"....

s (MANET) and mesh networks are therefore closely related, but MANET also have to deal with the problems introduced by the mobility of the nodes.

The self-healing capability enables a routing based network to operate when one node breaks down or a connection goes bad. As a result, the network is typically quite reliable, as there is often more than one path between a source and a destination in the network. Although mostly used in wireless scenarios, this concept is also applicable to wired networks and software interaction.

Wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks were originally developed for military applications and are typical of mesh architectures. Over the past decade the size, cost, and power requirements of radios has declined, enabling more radios to be included within each device acting as a mesh node. The additional radios within each node enable it to support multiple functions such as client access, backhaul service, and scanning (required for high speed handover in mobile applications). Additionally, the reduction in radio size, cost, and power has enabled the mesh nodes to become more modular—one node or device now can contain multiple radio cards or modules, allowing the nodes to be customized to handle a unique set of functions and frequency bands.

Work in this field has been aided by the use of game theory

Game theory

Game theory is a mathematical method for analyzing calculated circumstances, such as in games, where a person’s success is based upon the choices of others...

 methods to analyze strategies for the allocation of resources and routing of packets.

Examples

In early 2007, the US-based firm Meraki

Meraki

Meraki is a cloud networking company that provides hardware and software for building large scale wired and wireless networks. These networks are used by businesses, schools, and other organizations that need wireless access points, multi-site wired networks, or both. It uses a centralized...

 launched a mini wireless mesh router. This is an example of a wireless mesh network (on a claimed speed of up to 50 megabits per second). The 802.11 radio within the Meraki Mini has been optimized for long-distance communication, providing coverage over 250 metres. This is an example of a single-radio mesh network being used within a community as opposed to multi-radio long range mesh networks like BelAir or MeshDynamics that provide multifunctional infrastructure.

The Naval Postgraduate School

Naval Postgraduate School

The Naval Postgraduate School is an accredited research university operated by the United States Navy. Located in Monterey, California, it grants master's degrees, Engineer's degrees and doctoral degrees...

, Monterey CA, demonstrated a wireless mesh network for border security. In a pilot system, aerial cameras kept aloft by balloons relayed real time high resolution video to ground personnel via a mesh network.

An MIT Media Lab

MIT Media Lab

The MIT Media Lab is a laboratory of MIT School of Architecture and Planning. Devoted to research projects at the convergence of design, multimedia and technology, the Media Lab has been widely popularized since the 1990s by business and technology publications such as Wired and Red Herring for a...

 project has developed the XO-1 laptop or "OLPC"(One Laptop per Child) which is intended for disadvantaged schools in developing nations and uses mesh networking (based on the IEEE 802.11s

IEEE 802.11s

IEEE 802.11s is an IEEE 802.11 amendment for mesh networking, defining how wireless devices can interconnect to create a WLAN mesh network, which may be used for static topologies and ad-hoc networks....

 standard) to create a robust and inexpensive infrastructure. The instantaneous connections made by the laptops are claimed by the project to reduce the need for an external infrastructure such as the Internet to reach all areas, because a connected node could share the connection with nodes nearby. A similar concept has also been implemented by Greenpacket with its application called SONbuddy.

In Cambridge, UK, on the 3rd June 2006, mesh networking was used at the “Strawberry Fair

Strawberry Fair

Strawberry Fair is a local festival of music, entertainments, arts and crafts. which has been held in Cambridge, England, since 1974. The fair is held on Midsummer Common on the first Saturday in June. It is open to the public and free and totally independent from any council-run events...

” to run mobile live television, radio and Internet services to an estimated 80,000 people.

The Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network

Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network

The Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network is a special project of the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center . Started in 2000 by a group of developers wishing to take advantage of under-utilized Internet links purchased for public use , it began a partnership with UCIMC in 2004, gaining...

 (CUWiN) project is developing mesh networking software based on open source implementations of the Hazy-Sighted Link State Routing Protocol and Expected Transmission Count

Expected Transmission Count

The ETX metric, or expected transmission count, is a measure of the quality of a path between two nodes in a wireless packet data network. It is used extensively in mesh networking algorithms.-History:...

 metric. Additionally, the Wireless Networking Group in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign is a large public research-intensive university in the state of Illinois, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Illinois system...

 are developing a multichannel, multi-radio wireless mesh testbed, called Net-X as a proof of concept implementation of some of the multichannel protocols being developed in that group. The implementations are based on an architecture that allows some of the radios to switch channels to maintain network connectivity, and includes protocols for channel allocation and routing.

SMesh is an 802.11 multi-hop wireless mesh network developed by the Distributed System and Networks Lab at Johns Hopkins University

Johns Hopkins University

The Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States...

. A fast handoff scheme allows mobile clients to roam in the network without interruption in connectivity, a feature suitable for real-time applications, such as VoIP.

Many mesh networks operate across multiple radio bands. For example Firetide

Firetide

Firetide is an American, international provider of wireless mesh network technology. Based in the Silicon Valley, Firetide designs and sells hardware and software for wireless networks. Firetide's products have been used in over 2000 installations in 40 countries.- Corporate history :Firetide was...

 and Wave Relay mesh networks have the option to communicate node to node on 5.2 GHz or 5.8 GHz, but communicate node to client on 2.4 GHz (802.11). This is accomplished using SDR (Software-Defined radio

Software-defined radio

A software-defined radio system, or SDR, is a radio communication system where components that have been typically implemented in hardware are instead implemented by means of software on a personal computer or embedded computing devices...

.)

The SolarMESH project examined the potential of powering 802.11-based mesh networks using solar power and rechargeable batteries. Legacy 802.11 access points were found to be inadequate due to the requirement that are continuously powered. The IEEE 802.11s standardization efforts are considering power save options, but solar-powered applications might involve single radio nodes where relay-link power saving will be inapplicable.

The WING project (sponsored by the Italian Ministry of University and Research and led by CREATE-NET and Technion) developed a set of novel algorithms and protocols for enabling wireless mesh networks as the standard access architecture for next generation Internet. Particular focus has been given to interference and traffic aware channel assignment, multi-radio/multi-interface support, and opportunistic scheduling and traffic aggregation in highly volatile environments.

Recent standards for wired communications have also incorporated concepts from Mesh Networking. An examples is ITU-T

ITU-T

The ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector is one of the three sectors of the International Telecommunication Union ; it coordinates standards for telecommunications....

 G.hn

G.hn

G.hn is the common name for a home network technology family of standards developed under the International Telecommunication Union's Standardization arm and promoted by the HomeGrid Forum...

, a standard that specifies a high-speed (up to 1 Gigabit/s) local area network

Local area network

A local area network is a computer network that interconnects computers in a limited area such as a home, school, computer laboratory, or office building...

 using existing home wiring (power lines

Power line communication

Power line communication or power line carrier , also known as power line digital subscriber line , mains communication, power line telecom , power line networking , or broadband over power lines are systems for carrying data on a conductor also used for electric power transmission.A wide range...

, phone lines and coaxial cables

Ethernet over coax

Ethernet over Coax is a family of technologies that supports the transmission of Ethernet frames over coaxial cable.- History :The first Ethernet standard, known as 10BASE5 in the family of IEEE 802.3, specified baseband operation over coaxial cable...

). In noisy environments such as power lines (where signals can be heavily attenuated and corrupted by noise) it's common that mutual visibility between devices in a network is not complete. In those situations, one of the nodes has to act as a relay and forward messages between those nodes that cannot communicate directly, effectively creating a mesh network. In G.hn, relaying is performed at the Data Link Layer

Data link layer

The data link layer is layer 2 of the seven-layer OSI model of computer networking. It corresponds to, or is part of the link layer of the TCP/IP reference model....

.

See also

• Optimized Link State Routing Protocol (OLSR)
  Optimized link state routing protocol
  The Optimized Link State Routing Protocol is an IP routing protocol optimized for mobile ad-hoc networks, which can also be used on other wireless ad-hoc networks. OLSR is a proactive link-state routing protocol, which uses hello and topology control messages to discover and then disseminate...
  
  
• B.A.T.M.A.N.
  B.A.T.M.A.N.
  The Better Approach To Mobile Adhoc Networking, or B.A.T.M.A.N., is a routing protocol which is currently under development by the “Freifunk”-Community and intended to replace OLSR....
  
  
• Babel (protocol)
  Babel (protocol)
  The Babel routing protocol is a distance-vector routing protocol for Internet Protocol packet-switched networks that is designed to be robust and efficient on both wireless mesh networks and wired networks....
  
  
• Open Shortest Path First (OSPF)
  Open Shortest Path First
  Open Shortest Path First is an adaptive routing protocol for Internet Protocol networks. It uses a link state routing algorithm and falls into the group of interior routing protocols, operating within a single autonomous system . It is defined as OSPF Version 2 in RFC 2328 for IPv4...
  
  
• Opportunity Driven Multiple Access (ODMA)
  Opportunity Driven Multiple Access
  Opportunity-Driven Multiple Access is a UMTS communications relaying protocol standard first introduced by the European Telecommunication Standards Institute in 1996. ODMA has been adopted by the 3rd-Generation Partnership Project, 3GPP to improve the efficiency of UMTS networks using the TDD mode...
  
  
• Peer-to-peer
  Peer-to-peer
  Peer-to-peer computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads among peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application...
  
  
• Game theory in communication networks
  Game Theory in Communication Networks
  Game theory has recently become a useful tool for modeling and studying interactions betweencognitive radios envisioned to operate in future communications systems. Such terminals...
  
  
• ZigBee
  ZigBee
  ZigBee is a specification for a suite of high level communication protocols using small, low-power digital radios based on an IEEE 802 standard for personal area networks. Applications include wireless light switches, electrical meters with in-home-displays, and other consumer and industrial...
  
  
• Optical mesh network
  Optical mesh network
  Optical mesh networks are a type of telecommunications network.Transport networks, the underlying optical fiber-based layer of telecommunications networks, have evolved from DCS -based mesh architectures in the 1980s, to SONET/SDH ring architectures in the 1990s...
  
  
• Netsukuku
  Netsukuku
  Netsukuku is the name of an experimental peer-to-peer routing system, developed by the in 2006, created to build up a distributed network, anonymous and censorship-free, fully independent but not necessarily separated from the Internet, without the support of any server, ISP and no central...
  
  

Mesh network applications

• Wireless mesh network
  Wireless mesh network
  A wireless mesh network is a communications network made up of radio nodes organized in a mesh topology. Wireless mesh networks often consist of mesh clients, mesh routers and gateways.The mesh clients are often laptops, cell phones and other wireless devices while the mesh routers forward traffic...
  
  
• Distinct radio node deployments of Wireless Mesh Networking
  History of wireless mesh networking
  The core advantage of wireless mesh networks is their inherent ability to form a network on power up. Watch what happens in Fig 1, when the mesh nodes power up . The nodes hear each other's broadcast and form a network. Also watch what happens when a node fails and how the nodes discover an...
  
  
• BioWeb
  BioWeb
  The BioWeb is the connotation for a network of web-enabled biological devices which extends an internet of things to the Internet of Living Things of natural sensory devices. The BioWeb devices give insights to real-time ecological data and feedback to changes in the environment...
  
  
• Wireless ad hoc network
• Wireless community network
  Wireless community network
  Wireless community networks or wireless community projects are the organizations that attempt to take a grassroots approach to providing a viable alternative to municipal wireless networks for consumers....
  
  
• Mobile ad hoc network
  Mobile ad hoc network
  A mobile ad-hoc network is a self-configuring infrastructureless network of mobile devices connected by wireless links. ad hoc is Latin and means "for this purpose"....
  
   (MANET)
• Vehicular ad-hoc network
  VANET
  A Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network, or VANET is a technology that uses moving cars as nodes in a network to create a mobile network. VANET turns every participating car into a wireless router or node, allowing cars approximately 100 to 300 metres of each other to connect and, in turn, create a network with...
  
  
  • Intelligent Vehicular AdHoc Network

Mesh network devices

• MeshBox
  MeshBox
  MeshBox is an item of computer hardware which is used to provide large scale wireless broadband networks. Manufactured by LocustWorld, the devices are designed to co-operate with other MeshBoxes within range, passing the internet service from one box to the next, over the air, until it reaches the...
  
  
• Meraki
  Meraki
  Meraki is a cloud networking company that provides hardware and software for building large scale wired and wireless networks. These networks are used by businesses, schools, and other organizations that need wireless access points, multi-site wired networks, or both. It uses a centralized...
  
  
• Open-Mesh (http://www.open-mesh.com/)
• Village telco
  Village telco
  A Village telco is a community based telephone network. It is based on a suite of open source applications that enable entrepreneurs to set up and operate a telephone service in a specific area or supporting the needs of a specific community ....
  
   Mesh Potato

External links

• Smart Multi-Grid Wifi Mesh: Integrated wifi mesh network provides metering, traffic safety, wifi access to communities in US.
• MIT Roofnet A research project at MIT that forms the basis of roofnet / Meraki
  Meraki
  Meraki is a cloud networking company that provides hardware and software for building large scale wired and wireless networks. These networks are used by businesses, schools, and other organizations that need wireless access points, multi-site wired networks, or both. It uses a centralized...
  
  mesh networks
• WING Project Wireless Mesh Network distribution based on the roofnet source code
• Miners Give a Nod to Nodes Reprint from Mission Critical Magazine on successful deployment of mesh in mines
• DARPA's ITMANET program and the FLoWS Project Investigating Fundamental Performance Limits of MANETS
• Robin Chase discusses Zipcar and Mesh networking Robin Chase talks at the Ted conference about the future of mesh networking and eco-technology
• Mesh Networks Research Group Projects and tutorials' compilation related to the Wireless Mesh Networks
• Phantom anonymous, decentralized network, isolated from the Internet