Welcome to Wireless Network Research Group

Contents

Overview

Wireless Network Research Group engages in fundamental research on wireless networks and mobile computing. We strive to advance the state-of-the-art and to create new computing experiences with mobile, pervasive, personal, and embedded devices. Our group members' research interests span wireless networking, mobile systems, phone-based computing, security, and new networking paradigms. We emphasize both analytical and empirical approaches, and build actual systems to validate theoretical results and refine system principles from experimental work.

Wireless Mesh Network aims to extend the coverage of WLAN. To design a scalable and balanced architecture is the main key point. Mesh Nodes dynamically form a mesh, packets generates by mesh clients automately find a route, hopping from one neighbor to another to reach the Internet through one of the gateways. To realize this smart network, some features should be considered as follows
- [Chan: Channel Assignment for MR-WMN] --- Nodes working in the same channel could interference each other within the interference range. Thus, to enhance the capacity of wireless mesh network, multi-radio is introduced here. Each mesh node is equipped with multi-radio and each radio of a node assigns overlapped channel. However, there're two constrants here---radio number constraint & channel number constraint.
- Load Balanced Routing for WMN --- To achieve scalability and high throughput, load-balance should be considered. Meanwhile, for maximize the capacity of WMN, there're more than one gateway in a mesh. Outcoming flows may trasferred by different gateways and also the incoming flows. Thus, to enhance the scalability of WMN, load on each gateway of a mesh should be balanced. Otherwise, load on mesh nodes should be balanced too.
- Mobility Support in WMN -- WMN is designed to support Internet access for mobile users. Though the mesh routers are stable, mesh clients may mobile nodes. When they moves from an access domain to another, it may leads a new routing discovery.

Since cost of wireless interface is becomming more and more cheaper, one node equipped with multi-radio is more and more popular. And these interfaces may be producted with different transmission technology, such as Wi-Fi, WiMAX, UWB, and so on. Thus, a node is able to get connected by different wireless networks due to the bridging ability. In a mesh network which wishes to directly communicate with the neccessity or existence of any previously established infrastructure, having different radios on one device will bring more optional links for intermediate hops of a multi-hop transmission and improve the reliability of a mesh network. Detailed features are as follows:
- Physical Link Characterization -- As there're more than one communication technolgoy existing for a node, wireless links for a node are with different transmission property, such as different transmission range, packet scheduling, and so on. Giving a charcterization for these links to the upper protocol layer could enhance the performance of the whole network
- Cooperative Media Access Control --
- Multi-path routing

We are now working on build a MeshAp(on progress...)
. [ORIGINAL_TESTBED]USTCMESH is designed to analysis the wireless behavior. The Mesh Router is a MeshBox which is a desktop equipped with two wireless interfaces. Mesh Clients is just the laptops. They access Internet through Mesh Router.

NS2---Network Simulator Version 2.0: We have extended wireless mesh network support for it. Detailes could be seen in Resources
USTCPHONE--- A Sipphone with IPv6 supported