Networking Basics, as one of the standards network typologies. Mesh networks don’t connect notes back to a central hub, or daisy chain one to the next. Rather, they arise from a side effect of radio transmission, in that every radio transceiver can conceivably “see” and “hear” a number of other transceivers. Mesh Networks can form opportunistic routes, in which each node’s router sends data in the most efficient way among many different nodes that it can see. This not only reduces chokepoints but also adds redundancy, ensuring that s single node’s outage doesn’t bring down a network.
Note:
The Internet is supposed to work this way and sometimes does, but the number of possible routes on the internet’s high-level, long-haul routes is limited by actual physical connections between networks and machines.
Mesh networking gear thus makes it possible to extend a wireless network or increase its overall bandwidth simply by adding more mesh access points. As long as one of the mesh access points has an internet connection, every computer connected to the mesh network would be able to use it. With mesh networks, remote communities and dense urban areas alike could enjoy more reliable, more robust, and less expensiv/internet connectivity.
We’ve tested mesh networking when we’ve worked with Linksys’s WAP11 and WET11 as network bridges. Although they don’t incorporate mesh routing protocols for finding efficient ways to split data, they do let you create entirely wireless networks with some hub-and-spoke and some daisychain structures in them extending smaller networks into larger ones without any phone company or wire involved.
The logistics behind mesh networking have occupied for WISPs, Nokia’s RoofTop system lets you put units at any number of subscriber locations that can serve bandwidth to the household or organizations and pass traffic among other similar units. RoofTop bypasses the requirements for a line of sight from a WISP transmitter to each house.
1. Nokia (www.wbs.nokia.com). Designed for WISPs, Nokia’s RoofTop system lets you put units at any number of subscriber locations that can serve bandwidth to the household or organization and pass traffic among other similar units. RoofTop bypasses the requirement for a line of sight from a WISP transmitter to each house.
2. FHP Wireless (www.fhwireless.com). A newly announced set of products from this startup is designed to replace expensive point-to-point links for building out bandwidth to network clusters in situations like college and corporate campuses. The company’s SmartPoint router find the best paths to each other, and can automatically reroute if a connection fails. You can plug these routers into high-speed connections, and the system can aggeregate and distribute bandwidth as a pool.
3. RoamAD (www.roamad.com). A small company in New Zealand has found a way to blanket three square kilometers of downtown Auckland with ubiquitous 802.11b access using a combination of cleverly placed access points. wireless mesh-based backhaul (bandwidth from a wired connection distributed to the access points), and some special software that integrates the hardware for seamless roaming. RoamAD gurarantees a minimum of 330 Kbps but Glenn’s wireless Web log readers in Auckland report that they usually get much more than 330 Kbps. RoamAD hopes to have a 100-square-kilometer demonstration running soon.
As the technology necessary to convert a normal wireless access point into an access point into an access point capable of participating in a mesh network becomes widely available, we expect to see more and more access points including it. That in turn will likely cause community networking efforts to move even faster , since the effort of adding a node to the community network will be significantly less than what it is now.
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
