IEEE 802.11s Wireless Mesh Networks: Challenges and Perspectives

A promising solution for wireless environments is the wireless mesh technology that envisages supplementing wired infrastructure with a wireless backbone for providing Internet connectivity to mobile nodes (MNs) or users in residential areas and offices. The IEEE 802.11 TGs has started to work in developing a mesh standard for local area wireless networks. Although a lot of progress has been made and a few new drafts have been released recently, there exist many issues that demand enhanced or even new solutions to 802.11s mesh networking. This paper aims to overview the latest version of the IEEE 802.11s protocol (Draft 2.02), especially the MAC and routing layers, and to point out the challenges that these networks have to overcome in these layers.

[1]  Azman Osman Lim,et al.  IEEE 802.11s wireless mesh networks: Framework and challenges , 2008, Ad Hoc Networks.

[2]  Nagesh Nandiraju,et al.  Wireless Mesh Networks: Current Challenges and Future Directions of Web-In-The-Sky , 2007, IEEE Wireless Communications.

[3]  Edward W. Knightly,et al.  The IEEE 802.11s Extended Service Set Mesh Networking Standard , 2008, IEEE Communications Magazine.

[4]  Ian F. Akyildiz,et al.  Wireless mesh networks: a survey , 2005, Comput. Networks.

[5]  Ekram Hossain,et al.  Wireless Mesh Networks: Architectures and Protocols , 2008 .

[6]  Ian F. Akyildiz,et al.  A survey on wireless mesh networks , 2005, IEEE Communications Magazine.

[7]  Guido R. Hiertz,et al.  Principles of IEEE 802.11s , 2007, 2007 16th International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks.