Wireless Mesh Networks

The book includes a set of research and survey articles featuring the recent advances in theory and applications of wireless mesh networking technology which will be a significant component in the next generation (e.g., fourth generation) mobile communication networks. Wireless mesh networks 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 connectivity to the mesh clients. Wireless mesh networking has emerged as one of the most promising concept for self-organizing and auto-configurable wireless networking to provide adaptive and flexible 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 WLAN, WPAN, and WMAN technologies. Potential application scenarios for wireless mesh networks include access and 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 companies are building mesh networking platforms based on off-the-shelf wireless access technologies and developing demanding applications and services. This book provides a unified view of the state-of-the-art achievements in the area of wireless mesh networking technology.

The contributed articles from the leading experts in this field cover both the theoretical concepts (e.g., information-theoretic analysis) and system-level implementation issues. The topics include information-theoretic analysis of wireless mesh networks, challenges and issues in designing architectures and protocols for wireless mesh networks, medium access control and routing protocols for wireless mesh networks, cross-layer performance analysis and optimization in wireless mesh networks, multimedia over wireless mesh, trust and security in wireless mesh networks, cooperation and incentive techniques, reconfigurable and cognitive radio for wireless mesh networks, MIMO wireless mesh networks, wireless mesh test-beds and hardware prototypes, and applications and services. The book starts with the essential background on the basic concepts and architectures of wireless mesh networking (through one/two survey articles), and then it presents advanced level materials in a step-by-step fashion so that the readers can follow the book easily. The rich set of references in each of the articles are invaluable to the researchers.

The book is useful for both researchers and practitioners in this area. Also, it can be adopted as a graduate-level textbook for an advanced course on wireless communication networks.