The Wi-Mesh Alliance, said Tuesday it will issue its proposal to the IEEE 802.11 Task Group S, which is meeting in San Francisco to discuss a possible mesh standard. There are 15 separate proposals for the standard, which will be called IEEE 802.11s, said Bilel Jamoussi, director of strategic standards at the Chief Research Office of Nortel Networks.
“The ever expanding proliferation of wireless devices and communication services has made the development of a worldwide standard for mesh WLANs critical to their future success,” Mark Whitton, Nortel’s vice president of wireless solutions, said in a statement. “Wireless users expect secure seamless access anywhere, anytime, and the new standard proposed by the Alliance is designed to enable mesh WLANs to meet those expectations as wireless communications continue to evolve.”
The group said that the proposal is designed to work with current Wi-Fi standards as well as 802.11n, the still-evolving next-generation standard for Wi-Fi. Besides Nortel, other members of the alliance include Philips, Thomson, InterDigital and NextHop.
The Wi-Mesh proposal provides the specification for a scalable, adaptive and secure WLAN mesh standard. It offers the flexibility required to satisfy all residential, office, campus, public safety and military usage models. The proposal covers the MAC sublayer, the routing, the security and high layer interworking. It provides an extended mesh discovery solution with dynamic auto-configuration and integrated BSS and WLAN 802.11e QoS traffic handling. Security is addressed and extensions and enhancements are provided over the current 802.11i. The group said that the proposal is designed to work with current Wi-Fi standards as well as 802.11n, the still-evolving next-generation standard for Wi-Fi.
Unlike the broad Manet effort, the .11s group is tightly focused on a sweet spot of networks of up to 32 basestations and 1,000 clients . That solutions segment aims to embrace home, neighborhood and city meshes.
Right now, the players in TGs don’t really know what’s going to be submitted by the “competition.” Bilel Jamoussi, Director of Strategic Standards in the Chief Research Office at Nortel, was not ready to comment on what Intel or others might be proposing, saying instead, “We’re eager to understand the proposals from other players, to see where we can work and get alignment for the standard.”
Another major proposal is from a group called SEEMesh (Simple, Efficient and Extensible Mesh), which includes heavy hitters such as Intel, Texas Instruments, Nokia, Motorola and mesh network vendor Firetide, as well as Japanese mobile operator NTT DoCoMo. Tropos has developed its own wireless routing protocol, called Predictive Wireless Routing Protocol (PWRP), which is analogous to traditional wired routing protocols such as Open Shortest Path First (OSPF).
Getting Belair, Tropos and Firetide to sign on might be a big step towards any “defacto” standard. With a mesh standard, a degree of vendor interoperatbility might be expected. That would be a strong inducement for cities who are wary of investing millions in a single vendor mesh solution.
Mesh networks cover large geographic areas ranging from enterprise and university campuses to metropolitan areas and are based on 802.11, or Wi-Fi, technology. However, while standard Wi-Fi is standardized, mesh technology isn’t.
The July 2005 IEEE 802 LMSC Plenary Session is being held at the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco, during the week of July 17-22, 2005.
DailyWireless has more on Mesh Standards, Taipei’s Mesh Cloud, Scaling City-wide Mesh, NASA/Nortel Mesh Shuttle Coverage, Securing the Cloud, Hotels Get Meshed, Mesh Projects & Gear, MetroFi Goes Long, Mesh: Baton Rouge Et Al Citywide Mesh, Mesh Goes Downtown, Aiirnet & Telerama, Strix and Air Magnet, San Jose Free Cloud, Meshing at Intel, Meshed Roofnets, Mesh ISP, and City Mesh and Intel’s 802.11s for Home Mesh.
