NeTS-WN: New Technologies for Real-Time Wireless Mesh Networks with Transportation Applications

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Wireless mesh networks were originally proposed for connecting WLANs in residential or metropolitan areas to provide pervasive wireless access and share Internet connections. In the future, mesh networks will surely go far beyond the above application scenarios. This project aims to push mesh networks into the arena of real-time applications. Supporting real-time data delivery in wireless mesh networks is much more difficult than its counterpart in the wired networks due to resource constraints, shared wireless channels, lossy communication, and highly dynamic traffic. It requires system support from the bottom all the way to the top of the network protocol stack. The objective of this project is to develop new technologies at the MAC and network layers to support end-to-end, real-time data transport in wireless mesh networks. The research includes 1) real-time MAC protocols with bounded media access delay and minimized channel idle time, 2) queuing management for multiple service classes and distributed admission control of real-time traffic, and 3) end-to-end fairness, bandwidth assurance, quality-of-service (QoS) routing for real-time flows. The research results are expected to have significant intellectual and practical impact. Not only will the new technologies provide solutions to an array of fundamental problems in real-time mesh networks, but also they will expand the application scope of mesh networks from access networks to distributed real-time systems in diverse domains such as transportation, battlefield surveillance/command/control, and wireless multimedia communications.