Mesh radio is an innovative approach to delivering broadband access to residential and small business customers

INTRODUCTION :

It makes every customer’s equipment capable of providing service to its neighbours. 

Instead of using a central base station to serve all customers with in a radius of a few kilometres, it makes every customer’s equipment capable of providing service to its neighbours

Originally developed for Military application

The mesh radio avoids base stations and allows low power micro wave devices in the nodes.

It is a communication network made up of  radio nodes organized in a mesh topology.

The coverage area of radio nodes working as a single network is called mesh cloud.

Each wireless device is capable of acting as a router as well as an end station. 

ADVANTAGES :

* The mesh radio allow to deliver high-capacity and high-quality services to customers. * The mesh radio avoids base stations and allows low power micro wave devices in the nodes. This reduces the startup costs.

*  New customers do not need to be able to see a central base station, they only need to see? an existing customer’s antenna.* compared with cell phones mesh technology may raise fewer concerns over radiation health effects

* Power levels will be less than one watt; whereas cell phone masts push out eight watts

* It allows free flow of information without any moderation or selective rate control. Compared to the large DSL and cable modem systems that are centrally managed

* A mesh network offers multiple redundant communications paths throughout the network. 

* If one link fails for any reason, the network automatically routes messages through alternate paths.

Applications Of Mesh Radio

A significant application for wireless mesh networks is VoIP. 

By this, the wireless mesh may support local telephone calls to be routed through the mesh.

VoIP system uses session control protocol like SIP to set up and tear down of calls as well as audio codecs which encode speech allowing transmission over a mesh network as digital audio via an audio stream.

It is referred to as peer-to-peer or multipoint-to-multipoint topologies. Enables network expansion. 

Provides a self-healing architecture. It consists of an outdoor radio unit and

an indoor service presentation unit.

WIRELESS MESH NETWORKS :

As various wireless networks evolve into the next generation to provide better services, a key technology, Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs), has emerged recently. In WMNs, nodes are comprised of mesh routers and mesh clients. Each Node operates not only as a host but also as a router, forwarding packets on behalf of other nodes that may not be within direct wireless transmission range of their destinations. A node can send and receive messages, and in a mesh network, a node also functions as a router and can relay messages for its neighbors. 

The nodes can all communicate with each other even though they are not necessarily all within direct radio range

Packet radio communication with dynamic, scalable and redundant topology via multi-hop enabled mesh data forwarding.

Packet radio communication with dynamic, scalable and redundant topology via multi-hop enabled mesh data forwarding.

It is new Technology and experiment still on going.

Not possible to use in large area network.

Still having problems with Data Send & Receive technology.