Dependable wireless mesh networks: An integrated approach

Abstract

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are replacing wireless Infrastructure networks in many areas because of their lower cost and higher flexibility. However, applications in the Process Industry and Telerobotics field require not only flexible but also dependable service, which is not provided by existing solutions. To make a WMN dependable, many problems have to be solved on different layers. With this paper, we describe our ongoing work to provide an integrated solution to increase the dependability of WMNs. Our approach combines network coverage planning on the physical layer, bandwidth management on the link layer and live network monitoring to improve the reliability, availability and maintainability of a WMN. We provide fine-grained means to improve the predictability of the network components, thus making the WMN more dependable. In this paper, we present first results of our ongoing work, and describe how they are interleaved.

Keywords:

• wireless mesh network
• WMN
• dependability
• coverage planning
• admission control
• monitoring

Notes

Additional information

Notes on contributors

André Herms

1

Svilen Ivanov

2

Edgar Nett

3