IEEE working on mesh standard

The IEEE group charged with creating a standard for wireless LAN mesh rounded up 15 proposals at last week's 802.11 meeting in San Francisco. Members of the 802.11s task group hope to have a draft standard completed in 12 to 18 months.

Today's wireless LAN mesh networks use proprietary algorithms and are typically deployed outdoors. With an IEEE mesh standard implemented by WLAN vendors, it's possible that in the future every wireless LAN would also be able to configure itself as a mesh network, similar in concept to the Internet.

A wireless mesh uses a radio to interconnect access points and route wireless packets over the best available route. Mesh benefits include potentially higher performance and greater reliability.

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The IEEE group charged with creating a standard for wireless LAN mesh rounded up 15 proposals at last week's 802.11 meeting in San Francisco. Members of the 802.11s task group hope to have a draft standard completed in 12 to 18 months.

Today's wireless LAN mesh networks use proprietary algorithms and are typically deployed outdoors. With an IEEE mesh standard implemented by WLAN vendors, it's possible that in the future every wireless LAN would also be able to configure itself as a mesh network, similar in concept to the Internet.

A wireless mesh uses a radio to interconnect access points and route wireless packets over the best available route. Mesh benefits include potentially higher performance and greater reliability.

Today's 802.11 wireless LANs use a star topology: users link wirelessly to an access point, which then links via Ethernet cable to a LAN switch.

An array of companies - including BelAir Networks, Nortel , Tropos and Strix Systems - are already selling mesh access points for 802.11 wireless LANs.

Many, such as BelAir and Tropos, have focused on creating very large outdoor networks that can blanket a community with a WLAN for public safety applications or Internet access.

The Wi-Mesh Alliance (WMA) is a group of hardware, software and other vendors that is submitting a technology proposal to the 11s task group. A handful of complete proposals and 10 partial proposals were filed last week, according to WMA member Nortel. Other Alliance members include Accton Technology, InterDigital, NextHop and Thomson.

The key elements in the proposals concern the algorithms for auto-discovery and for routing, says Bilel Jamoussi, director of strategic protocols and standards at Nortel. There might be some hardware elements to support QoS in unicasting and multicasting, he says. Both of these transmission types let a mesh create a subset of access points, optimizing bandwidth and routing. "When you enlarge the network's geography, and are streaming multimedia over it, multicasting lets you do that efficiently by sending [the stream] only to those access points that are interested in it," Jamoussi says.

As with conventional wireless LANs, 802.11s mesh networks' security will be based on the IEEE 802.11i standard. Jamoussi says a number of extensions to 11i will be needed for key management and data encryption requirements in a mesh.

One controversy that some vendors have been arguing about is how many radios are needed to create efficient wireless backhaul connections among the access points in a mesh. "The alliance proposal supports both single- and multiple-radio configurations," Jamoussi says.

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