The pending infiltration of Wi-Fi mesh

802.11s mesh standard grows legs

Industry analysis by expert Joanie Wexler, plus links to the day's wireless news headlines

Like the perpetual student, some extensions to the 802.11 wireless LAN standard seem as though they, too, will linger in an indefinite state of development. However, one of those dallying standards, 802.11s for mesh networking, has suddenly registered a pulse.

Though final standards ratification of 802.11s isn’t expected until late 2009, mesh company PacketHop intends to announce today at the Interop trade show in Las Vegas that it is licensing pre-standard 802.11s software and firmware to makers of just about anything with the potential to wirelessly peer with something else. Think specialty applications for cars, industrial robots, surveillance cameras, electronic games, and home entertainment components, to name a few.

In the case of home components, for example, an all-wireless peer network would lighten the load on the in-home wireless access point (AP) or router, which would no longer have to serve as a hub for all inter-device communications.

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Like the perpetual student, some extensions to the 802.11 wireless LAN standard seem as though they, too, will linger in an indefinite state of development. However, one of those dallying standards, 802.11s for mesh networking, has suddenly registered a pulse.

Though final standards ratification of 802.11s isn’t expected until late 2009, mesh company PacketHop intends to announce today at the Interop trade show in Las Vegas that it is licensing pre-standard 802.11s software and firmware to makers of just about anything with the potential to wirelessly peer with something else. Think specialty applications for cars, industrial robots, surveillance cameras, electronic games, and home entertainment components, to name a few.

In the case of home components, for example, an all-wireless peer network would lighten the load on the in-home wireless access point (AP) or router, which would no longer have to serve as a hub for all inter-device communications.

PacketHop says it doesn’t expect to be the only one to make such a move.

“I’m assuming there are other companies doing the same thing to help make 802.11s successful and broadly deployed,” says David Gurevich, VP of engineering at PacketHop, which sold mesh communications systems to first responders before being acquired last year by SRI International.

Wireless mesh protocols allow 802.11-based devices to discover one another over the air and build an efficient wireless transmission path among them around interference and congested or failed nodes, much as routers do in a wired IP network. Though 802.11s has been a gleam in the 802.11 community’s eye for nearly five years, mesh pioneers such as Bel-Air, Firetide, Strix, SkyPilot and Tropos preferred to develop their own mesh algorithms.

Those companies have focused largely on outdoor networking applications such as wireless backhaul, municipal wireless and public safety communications. Because their customers were highly likely to build their networks using a single mesh equipment supplier, there wasn’t much urgency for a standard that would allow mesh interoperability.

But enter the mix-and-match world of components bought and deployed by many different people choosing different suppliers and, voila, you pretty much need one.

The enterprise-class WLAN vendors have begun rolling out mesh capabilities in their pre-standard 802.11n APs using either the Wireless Distribution System (WDS) inter-AP capability in the 802.11standard or proprietary protocols. WDS allows APs to connect directly over the air, but doesn’t support best-path routing or a security scheme to designate supplicant and authenticator among peers, says Gurevich.

Presumably, these APs, too, will eventually use standard meshing for all the beloved interoperability reasons standards are created in the first place. Hey, if you can use pre-11n technology, why not pre-11s?

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Joanie Wexler is an independent networking technology writer/editor in Silicon Valley.