NeTS-NBD: Multi-Channel Wireless Mesh Networks: Capacity, Protocols, and Experimental Evaluation

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

The density of wireless devices in homes, offices, and public spaces is expected to continue to increase with time, making it important to develop strategies to fully utilize the available wireless spectrum. Towards this goal, this project investigates protocol mechanisms that can exploit the availability of multiple wireless channels within a single wireless mesh network, while requiring each host or router to use only a small number of wireless interfaces. With a small number of interfaces, although a single host may not be able to use all the channels simultaneously, a group of hosts in a given neighborhood may be collectively able to use all the channels. This project strives to develop suitable protocols to translate this intuition into reality. The project is expected to have an impact on theory and practice of wireless mesh networking, by improving performance achievable in such networks. The anticipated results of the project include: Fundamental capacity analysis that establishes fundamental limits on performance of multi-channel wireless mesh networks, Network layer and link layer mechanisms that exploit availability of multiple wireless channels, while using a small number of interfaces at the hosts, and Experimental demonstration and evaluation of selected mesh networking protocols.