WiMO/SWiM: Resource Management in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks are comprised of a network of fixed access points that form a wide area network while providing a set of gateway nodes to access the Internet. The following two sister projects address resource management issues in the context of wireless mesh networks (For more details please refer to http://spirit.cs.ucdavis.edu/wimo/):

• WiMO: Wireless Management Overlay:
  
  The goal of this project is to design and develop a light-weight, common management framework to coordinate the monitoring, and resource control of community wireless mesh networks. To support truly ubiquitous mobile computing, users should be able to access services and data with high throughput through multiple (and potentially heterogeneous) wireless access networks with different resource constraints using client devices with varying capabilities. Advances in the current generation of wireless networks have been focused primarily on the homogeneous environments and single-hop connections to wireless access points or base stations. These advances are inadequate in heterogeneous and multi-hop wireless networks for supporting the requirements of evolving applications such as peer-to-peer media sharing, real-time traffic, and multicasting. Resource management across the heterogeneous networks is essential to provide end-to-end services for these demanding application classes.
  
  
• SWiM: Scalable Wireless Mesh:
  
  We envision a scalable wireless mesh network in a multi-story enterprise building, with tens-to-hundreds of portals and APs and hundreds-to-thousands of users. Scalability, in terms of bandwidth and QoS under dynamic traffic conditions, is the major concern in such an enterprise network. While current wireless network scales by deploying more wired APs, often in an ad-hoc mode, we propose to address the scalability issue through intelligent portal deployment and through multi-channel multi-radio technology. In addition, current wireless networking lacks the integration and formations that are stabilized in today's wired enterprise networks. We exploit the flexibility of the heterogeneous architecture to improve user experience.