WIRELESS MESH NETWORKS : STATE OF THE ART AND RESEARCH DIRECTIONS

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are currently becoming one of the most promising approaches to provide ubiquitous broadband Internet access. This paper provides a survey on recent advances and open research issues in WMNs. Network architectures and real world testbed are described, followed by some reference applications scenario. State-of-the-art protocols for WMNs are illustrated highlighting the most relevant research challenges. Finally, we report some performance measurements obtained on an experimental WiFi-based mesh testbed running at CREATE-NET premises. The tests aim at characterizing the suitability of current mesh networking solutions to support multimedia flows. The obtained performance is compared to those obtained by means of a conventional star-shaped topology based on the use of access points. The result show that mesh architectures are able to offer some advantages, in terms of fairness and lower packet loss rate, with respect to a standard access points based architecture.

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