A Special Issue on "Wireless Mesh Networks"

Having network connectivity anywhere anytime has been a dream for decades. To realize such a dream, viable solutions to the next generation wireless networking become indispensable. Prior research and development efforts on this subject, especially wireless mesh networks (WMNs), have led to significant research contributions including theoretical capacity bounds and various flavors of wireless networking protocols. However, the stateof-art work is still insufficient for WMNs in many aspects such as network capacity, scalability, manageability, and security. Thus, in this special issue we called for papers that were dedicated to recent research advances in the area of wireless mesh networking. In response to the Call for Papers, 28 papers were submitted to our special issue. They were reviewed in two phases. In the ‘‘quick review’’ phase, papers out of scope were screened out by guest editors. The papers which passed the first phase were then peer reviewed. After the second phase, eight papers were selected for publication. These papers address a large variety of different challenging research topics of WMNs. In the first paper, MeshUp: Self-Organizing Mesh-Based Topologies for Next Generation Radio Access Networks, a non-hierarchical multihop access network framework is proposed by Samik Ghosh, Kalyan Basu and Sajal K. Das. In this framework two generic families of mesh-based topologies are studied based on a graph theoretic framework and a fractal geometric architecture, respectively. Analysis shows that a combination of different mesh-based multi-hop access topologies provides significant advantages over existing access technologies.