Presentation
Recent advances in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) provide promising opportunities in communication paradigms. WMNs do not depend on wired communication infrastructure and their mesh connectivity provides inherent built-in redundancy. This makes them also good candidates for providing an alternative communication mechanism e.g. in the face of disasters when normal communication infrastructure is destroyed or for covering large rural areas. WMNs inherit many properties from Mobile Ad-Hoc networks. However, several assumptions on e.g. mobility of nodes can be relaxed, which enables the design of more robust and efficient protocols and the provisioning of higher quality services for WMNs. Several research problems still remain, though, and it is not clear whether WMNs are really beneficial as compared to other alternatives such as long range wireless or wireless relay networks (e.g. based on 802.16j). In this invited workshop, we would like to focus on the research challenges in WMNs, with a special focus on the mechanisms needed for "carrier class" service provisioning (architectures, network components, QoS mechanisms, etc.) in Wireless Mesh Networks.
