Advances in Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Wireless mesh networks facilitate the extension of wireless local area networks into wide areas and have emerged as a promising approach for future network accesses. Prior efforts on wireless networks, especially multi-hop ad hoc networks, have led to significant research contributions that range from fundamental results on theoretical capacity bounds to numerous practical routing and transport protocols. Unlike ad hoc networks, however, mesh networks can serve as access networks that employ multi-hop wireless forwarding by fixed mesh nodes to relay traffic to and from the wired Internet. The unique features of wireless mesh networks pose challenges in designing affordable, reliable, and sustainable network infrastructures. The critical issues span a rich spectrum of issues from interference-aware channel assignment, multi-hop routing, to reliable transport and infrastructure optimization, many of which have to be revisited in this new context. The purpose of this special issue is to archive the stateof-the-art achievements in wireless mesh networking. We received 30 original and unpublished research papers in both theoretical studies and practical protocol/architecture designs for wireless mesh networks, as well as prototypes. All these papers have gone through a strict peer review process, and among them, 14 high quality papers were selected, which offer a broad and updated coverage of wireless mesh network research and development. In addition, two high-quality papers selected from The Third International Wireless Internet Conference (WICON’2007) are included in this special issue as well. The first two papers of the special issue deal with quality of service (QoS) issue in wireless mesh networks. The paper “Provisioning of Parameterized Quality of Service in 802.11e Based Wireless Mesh Networks,” by Xiaowen Chu, presents a framework for the provisioning of parameterized QoS in 802.11e based wireless mesh networks. By enforcing admission control algorithms and scheduling algorithms, this framework can support constant bit-rate (CBR) and variable bit-rate (VBR) traffic flows. Deterministic endto-end delay bounds for CBR traffic flows and VBR traffic flows that conform to leaky-bucket regulators have been derived. For VBR traffic flows without leaky-bucket regulators, a dynamic transmission opportunity (TXOP) scheduling algorithm has been proposed which was shown to be very effective in achieving high channel utilization ratio while keeping an acceptable delay performance. The paper entitled “QoS Differentiation for IEEE 802.16 WiMax Mesh Networks,” by Yan Zhang, Honglin Hu, and HsiaoMobile Netw Appl (2008) 13:1–5 DOI 10.1007/s11036-008-0055-3