Emerging standards for wireless mesh technology

The explosive growth of the Internet over the last decade has led to an increasing demand for high-speed, ubiquitous Internet access. Broadband wireless technologies are increasingly gaining popularity by the successful global deployment of the wireless personal area networks (Bluetooth-IEEE 802.15.1), wireless local area networks (WiFi- IEEE 802.lln), and wireless metropolitan area networks (WiMAX- IEEE 802.16). New ICT and e-Learning strategies and advances in wireless standards and technologies- particularly in the areas of Bluetooth, WiFi (wireless fidelity), WiMAX (worldwide interoperability for microwave access) and mobile computing can help to bridge the digital divide in education and research. Using open broadband Wireless technologies and implementing mobile computing architectures, one can overcome the challenges of ground, infrastructure, and finance to increase access; deploy broadband quickly and cost-effectively to areas currently not served; and extend the benefits of digital revolution to previously unreachable populations. These technologies aim to provide low-cost, high-performance Wireless access to residential and business applications. As technology evolves to address portable and mobile applications, the required features and performance of the system will increase. Evolution toward the phase called "full mobility" provides incremental support for low latency, low packet loss and real-time handoff of subscriber terminals operating at high speeds. This paper presents the analogy of promising wireless technologies on different frequencies: Bluetooth, WiFi, and WiMAX. This paper is organised into four parts: part I describes the functionality and usage of Bluetooth in the wireless personal area networks, part II presents the WiFi- IEEE 802.1 In strategies for users considering higher-bandwidth alternatives to existing wireless personal area networks, part III discusses how the WiMAX is used as a current standard for Wireless data transmission technology, which is optimized to deliver high, bursty data rates to mobile subscribers, and to support real-time multimedia and Voice over IP (VoIP) applications, and part-TV explores how these emerging Wireless technologies differ from one another.

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) have attracted increasing attention from the research community as a high-performance and low-cost solution to last-mile broadband Internet access. On the other side, Optical Burst Switching (OBS) is a promising access technology that uses optical fiber with burst switching paradigm. In this paper, we propose a novel Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) architecture, called Optical Burst Wireless Mesh Architecture (OBWMA) which integrates WMN at the user access side and OBS at the core of the MAN. OBWMA aims to combine advantages of both WMNs and OBS networks, such as large coverage at low cost and bandwidth availability. We specify the details of the interconnection and the internetworking of WMNs and the OBS network in OBWMA. Moreover, we develop an analytical model to compute the end-to-end delay in OBWMA in order to support flow requests with delay constraints. Furthermore, we propose a Control Bridge (CB) that ensures Quality of Service (QoS) mapping at the border between the WMN and the OBS parts. Also, we propose a burst assembly scheme, called Adaptive Hybrid Burst Assembly scheme (AHBA). Simulation results using ns-2 demonstrate the feasibility of OBWMA and the validity of our analytical model.

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) have been attracting increasing interest for supporting a new generation of ubiquitous computing systems with great potential for many applications. However, the communication paradigms in WSNs differ from the ones associated to traditional wireless networks, triggering the need for efficient wireless communication technology. Several wireless technologies have emerged ranging from short and medium distance. Bluetooth, ZigBee and Impulse Radio Ultra Wide Band (IR-UWB) are three popular short range wireless communications. Due to its various features and advantages (especially low power consumption and low complexity), IR-UWB is a very promising wireless communication technology for WSN. In this paper, we evaluate the main features and advantages of this new technology (IR-UWB) for WSN in terms of transmission time, data coding and power consumption compared to Bluetooth and ZigBee. To analyze and evaluate the main features and advantages of IR-UWB as an efficient short range wireless communication technology for WSN, we used MiXiM platform under OMNet++ simulator.

Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is a new wireless technology and it has the features of large area network coverage, Internet broadband access, self-healing, self-configuring and self-organizing. Routing is an important research issue in WMN. Many routing protocols are available in WMN. These protocols are divided into two categories proactive (Table Driven) and reactive (On-demand) protocols. This paper discusses the performance of proactive routing protocol Destination Sequenced Distance Vector (DSDV) in WMN by considering the various performance metrics (packet delivery ratio, routing overhead and dropped packets) by varying transmission rate and mesh client speed.

Wireless Mesh Network is a new kind of wireless communication technology widely used in near-field communication, has obvious application advantage in position information sharing service. The paper introduce WMN's technical characteristics used in the fields of Wireless Personal Area Network, analyze WMN's application advantage compared with Ad hoc Network, discuss four kinds of WPAN's traditional application mechanism based on WMN. Based above, describe a new kind of WPAN standard based on WMN called IEEE 802.15.5. Then, put forward a WMN's application case used in vehicle navigation and positioning, has important practical guiding significance of instructing WMN used in the fields of position information sharing service.

Due to recent advances in wireless technologies, wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are expected in the near future to fully handle content-rich multimedia services with various quality of services (QoS) guarantee. Unlike traditional data applications, multimedia applications require QoS support in order to satisfy the user's service requirements. Admission control has been advocated as a promising approach to tackle this challenging issue since it is a key management function for which a new flow is admitted based on the condition that the QoS requirements of all flows in the network can still be met after the new flow begins. In this paper, a Rate Adaptive Routing on Cliques Admission Control protocol (so-called RA-RCAC) for WMNs is proposed, which is able to provide feedbacks to the application layer whenever congestion occurs in the network. The RA-RCAC scheme merges the design features of two chosen benchmarking schemes, namely, an Interference-Aware Admission Control and QoS routing protocol in WMN (so-called IAAC) and a distributed admission control protocol for WMNs (so-called RCAC) to produce a protocol design that satisfies the QoS guarantee. Our proposed RA-RCAC protocol is evaluated using simulation analysis. The performance evaluation results demonstrate its superiority over the aforementioned benchmark schemes in terms of throughput, end-to-end delay, packet delivery ratio, and loss ratio performance evaluation metrics.

Internet of Things (IoT) evolution calls for stringent communication demands, including low delay and reliability. At the same time, wireless mesh technology is used to extend the communication range of IoT deployments, in a multi-hop manner. However, Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are facing link failures due to unstable topologies, resulting in unsatisfied IoT requirements. Named-Data Networking (NDN) can enhance WMNs to meet such IoT requirements, thanks to the content naming scheme and in-network caching, but necessitates adaptability to the challenging conditions of WMNs.In this work, we argue that Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an ideal solution to fill this gap and introduce an integrated SDN-NDN deployment over WMNs involving: (i) global view of the network in real-time; (ii) centralized decision making; and (iii) dynamic NDN adaptation to network changes. The proposed system is deployed and evaluated over the wiLab.1 Fed4FIRE+ test-bed. The proof-of-concept results validate that the centralized control of SDN effectively supports the NDN operation in unstable topologies with frequent dynamic changes, such as the WMNs.

For its self-organizing, self-configuring, and self-healing capabilities, as well as their low cost and ease of maintenance, Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have emerged as a potential technology for a wide range of applications.  Due to their inherent characteristics such as shared wireless medium, multi-hop and inter-network communication, highly dynamic network topology, and decentralised architecture, securing WMNs is a  more challenging and complex issue.  The WMNs are vulnerable to a variety of MAC layer attacks because of these vulnerabilities. Existing MAC layer standards and implementations are insufficient to secure these functionalities, and they do not provide comprehensive security solutions to protect both the backbone and the client mesh. As a result, efficient, scalable, and integrated security solutions for WMNs are required. We classify MAC layer attacks and examine existing countermeasures in this paper. Based on the classification of attacks and the analysis of countermeasures, we derive research directions for improving the MAC layer security of WMNs.

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are an important networking infrastructure for providing cost-efficient broadband wireless connectivity to a group of users. WMNs are increasingly being used in urban areas, metropolitan and municipal area networks for deployment of medical, transport, surveillance systems, etc. The good performance and operability of WMNs largely depends on placement of mesh routers nodes in the geographical area to achieve network connectivity and stability. Therefore, optimal placement of router nodes in WMNs is a main issue in deployment of WMNs. In this work we propose and evaluate local search methods for placement of mesh routers in WMNs with a two fold objective: maximizing the size of the giant component in the network and user coverage. Given a grid area where to distribute a given number of mesh router nodes, which can have different radio coverage, and a number of fixed clients a priori distributed in the given area, local search methods explore different local movements and incrementally improve the quality of the router nodes placement in terms of network connectivity and user coverage. We have experimentally evaluated the considered local search methods through a benchmark of generated instances varying from small to large size. In the instances, different distributions of mesh clients (Uniform, Normal, Exponential and Weibull) are considered aiming to evaluate the quality of achieved solutions for different client distributions. Although local search methods can be stuck in local optima, the experimental evaluation showed their good performance; local search methods could thus be applied as a first choice for optimizing network connectivity and user coverage in WMNs.

From last decade, the tremendous growth of cloud computing and advancement in wireless communication technology has increased the usage of portable devices and facilitated mobile users to take advantage of mobile cloud services. Conversely, the high communication costs and inferior performance of mobile Internet over wide-area cellular network access obstruct the mobile devices' capabilities in resource provisioning, on-demand applications and quality of service sensitivity during communication. In this paper, we proposed and deployed a network architecture that integrates localized and distributed mini-clouds (enhanced cloudlets) with low-cost and fast-deployable wireless mesh networks. We implemented a testbed, which is empowered with a real-life private cloudlet and an emulated wireless mesh network. The empirical results demonstrated that the proposed architecture is promising towards providing a localized, cost-effective wireless cloud access to users on the move.

The ever-increasing use of Internet of Things (IoT) devices results in the implementation of multiple wireless technologies that would not only cater their data rate requirements but also support various applications. To optimize the energy efficiency and security of the wireless transmission, it is imperative to identify the wireless technologies in various IoT implementations. Many of the existing approaches are based on measuring only the receiving signal strength indicator (RSSI). However, such approaches may not work well because of transmit power control and complex channel variations among different wireless technologies. In this article, we propose an autonomous wireless detection scheme that considers multiple distinguishable physical (PHY)-layer settings for real-time identification of wireless technologies for real-time applications. Specifically, the proposed scheme relies on the PHY-layer measurements of the targeted spectrum. Transmission settings, such as bandwidth, carrier frequency, and RSSI are estimated from the raw in-phase and quadrature-phase (I/Q) measurements. In addition, a symbol-level extraction scheme is implemented to extract unique features of modulation settings. These aforementioned features are applied to a machine learning process to identify the received wireless technologies. Compared with raw I/Q measurements, the extracted features are much simplified and, thus, the machine learning classifier can be designed with a simple structure for fast processing on IoT nodes. Finally, the proposed schemes are primarily evaluated theoretically, followed by implementing them on a USRP software-defined radio (SDR)-based hardware testbed. The evaluation results demonstrate high accuracy in the real-time detection of different wireless technologies for seamless IoT applications.

The popularity and the constant improvement of wireless technologies, such as WiFi and WiMAX, have been increasing the usage and applicability of new networking schemes, including Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs). WMNs are multi-hop wireless networks made by a collection of two types of nodes, mesh routers and mesh clients. Their self-organizing, self-configuring and self-healing proprieties, in conjunction with their low maintenance and implementation costs, make them especially appealing as a solution for Internet access and social networking. The characteristics of WMNs make them more susceptible to malicious attacks than traditional wired networks, namely the scarce bandwidth, the high level of interference, the shared transmission media and the limited physical security. Secure routing and forwarding schemes are a key component to guarantee secure communications in hostile environments. There are however issues that must be considered when developing secure routing and forwarding solutions, namely the overhead introduced by such approaches and the effectiveness of the prediction schemes used. This paper discusses the main solutions for routing security in WMNs and presents a thorough evaluation, comprising a novel way to characterize the effectiveness of such approaches. The evaluation is based on CONFIDANT, a secure routing protocol based on the DSR protocol. The study performed addresses both the issues aforementioned and provides insight on the trade-offs associated with the deployment of secure routing and forwarding mechanisms.

Wireless technology is emerging as a key technology for the future networks. Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as an indispensable technology for deployment of wireless services for various applications in personal, enterprise, and metropolitan areas. Researchers are working actively in different fields of WMNs for providing better services. Routing protocols play a vital role in WMNs to provide reliable configuration and maintenance of topology of the network. Designing a suitable cost metric for routing protocols to provide quality links for data transmission is the backbone of WMNs. Many cost metrics have been proposed for WMNs and is still an active research topic as new performance metrics need to be discovered due to the dynamics of this field. This paper considers the genetic algorithm-based routing technique for WMN.We have studied the existing cost metrics and proposed a genetic algorithm technique for routing in WMN. To evaluate the genetic algorithm, and to determine the relative performance of the genetic algorithm in the context of routing in WMN, we carry out experiments on two test systems. We have evaluated the quality of the results produced by our algorithm with the traditional hop count metric results. Our results show that routing in WMN using genetic algorithm produces better results as compared to traditional hop count metric results. Finally, we carry out a detailed analysis of results, which help us in gaining an insight into the suitability of genetic algorithm for routing in WMN.

Wireless mesh networks are a promising area for the deployment of new wireless communication and networking technologies. In this paper, we address the problem of enabling effective peer-to-peer resource sharing in this type of networks. Starting from the well-known Chord protocol for resource sharing in wired networks, we propose a specialization that accounts for peculiar features of wireless mesh networks: namely, the availability of a wireless infrastructure, and the 1-hop broadcast nature of wireless communication, which bring to the notions of location awareness and MAC layer cross-layering. Through extensive packet-level simulations, we investigate the separate effects of location awareness and MAC layer cross-layering, and of their combination, on the performance of the P2P application. The combined protocol, MeshChord, reduces message overhead of as much as 40 percent with respect to the basic Chord design, while at the same time improving the information retrieval performance. Notably, differently from the basic Chord design, our proposed MeshChord specialization displays information retrieval performance resilient to the presence of both CBR and TCP background traffic. Overall, the results of our study suggest that MeshChord can be successfully utilized for implementing file/resource sharing applications in wireless mesh networks.

Access to general purpose information and communication technology (ICT) is not equally distributed on our planet: developed countries represent about 70% of all Internet users, while its percentage of Internet hosts has raised from 90% in 2000 to about 99% in 2002. Things change dramatically if we look at mobile and wireless technology: developing countries already represent about 40% of mobile connections in 2000, with a foreseen growth rate that is faster in developing countries than in developed ones in the period 2000-2005 (mainly due to India and the People’s Republic of China). This trend is driven by the new perspectives offered by mobile electronic technology applications that provide an alternative to poor telecommunication infrastructures still common in many developing countries. The technological evolution in wireless data communications is introducing a rich landscape of new services relying on three main technologies: • proximity (or personal) area networks (PANs), composed of personal and wearable devices capable of automatically setting up transient communication environments (also known as ad hoc networks); • wireless local area network technologies (WLANs); and • a third generation of mobile telecommunications (3G), gradually replacing General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) and the related set of technologies collectively called “2.5 Generation” (2.5G). PAN is a new technology bringing the “always connected” principle to the personal space. On the other hand, 3G systems and WLANs have coexisted for a while; what is new is their interconnection, aimed at decoupling terminals and applications from the access method. 3G mobile networks already provide video-capable bandwidth, global roaming for voice and data, and access to Internet-rich online content. Thanks to their increasing integration, PANs, WLANs, and 3G networks will extend the user’s connectivity in a complementary and hierarchical manner; in the fullness of time, they will provide all the functionalities of an Integrated Services Multimedia Network (ISMN), enabling a whole set of new business models and applications. The fusion of these technologies will eventually result in an ultimate ubiquitous wireless system that will be operated from anywhere, including homes, business locations, vehicles, and even commercial aircrafts. However, although wireless communications provide great flexibility and mobility, they often come at the expense of security. Indeed, wireless communications rely on open and public transmission media that expose new vulnerabilities in addition to the security threats found in wired networks. A number of specific open issues and even inherent dangers, some of which had been already identified and described in the early stages of wireless technology adoption, are yet to be solved (Howard, 2000). For instance, with wireless communications, important and vital information is often placed on a mobile device that is vulnerable to theft and loss. In addition, information is transmitted over the unprotected airwaves, and finally, 3G networks are getting smaller and more numerous, causing opportunities for hackers and other abusers to increase.