Mesh Enabling Technology

TLDR: This chapter describes the relevant aspects of various cellular approaches, including various 802.16 and 3GPP standards, as well as the newly emerging cognitive or “white space” networking approaches, which are providing extensions to multi-hopping, and becoming more relevant than the 802.11 technology which was earliest put to work on WMNs.

Abstract: While the mesh network paradigm does not constrain the physical and medium layer realizations, some technologies emerge over time as clearly being better suited. This becomes especially true when considering service continuity issues, and therefore robustness of enabling technologies. In recent times, Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) technology at the lower layer is seen to hold promise to improve the predictability and dependability of mesh networks. At a higher level, various cellular approaches, including various 802.16 and 3GPP standards, as well as the newly emerging cognitive or “white space” networking approaches, are providing extensions to multi-hopping, and becoming more relevant than the 802.11 technology which was earliest put to work on WMNs. In this chapter, we briefly describe the relevant aspects of these, including references to some relevant literature. We start with a few remarks on 802.11 as background.