Electrical & Computer Engineering Technical Reports

Document Type

Technical Report

Publication Date

5-7-2007

Abstract

The rapid spread of mobile devices, the emergence of key wireless technologies, and the nomadic user and computing lifestyles on current networks are continuously evolving in synergy. MANETs, WSNs, and WMNs are examples of self-organizing unstructured networks that have their local communication paradigms and are optimized to perform under their particular physical constraints. Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are particularly interesting because of their ability to operate in a pure ad-hoc mode or to include some infrastructural components, making them suitable for a multitude of applications. Inter-networking among the heterogeneous access networks is currently offered by the Internet Protocol (IP). However, the evolution of and the innovation within these networks is greatly hindered by the rigidity of the current Internet implementation and its lag in efficiently supporting flexible unstructured communication paradigms. To broaden the user's innovation space and to efficiently embrace the characteristics of emerging networks, clean-slate architectural approaches are being pursued. In this paper, we propose InterMesh, a novel iner-networking platform for wireless mesh networks. InterMesh enables heterogeneous access networks to converge at novel Persistent Identification and Networking Layer (PINL), providing a seamless service to individual network entities. This paper identifies the key concepts behind the InterMesh network platform, presents an interesting prototype implementation that can coexist with today's Internet while still be able to evolve separately, and discusses some preliminary performance results of the prototype.

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