Wireless Mesh Networks

Roland Piquepaille writes "Robert Poor is CTO of Ember Corporation. He contends that point-to-point or point-to-multipoint networks typical of industrial wireless communications systems have limited scalability and reliability. 'In contrast, wireless mesh networks are multihop systems in which devices assist each other in transmitting packets through the network, especially in adverse conditions. You can drop these ad-hoc networks into place with minimal preparation, and they provide a reliable, flexible system that can be extended to thousands of devices.' The article is pretty technical and contains several illustrations and a case study about the deployment of a wireless mesh network in a water treatment plant. Check this column for Poor's conclusions or read this Sensors article if you have more time."

Comments

Conclusion:

[Krapangor]

Poor has no clue. It's a trivial insight that the routing with such multihop systems is very problematic, especially if you want optimal routing. A second problem is the non-static structure of the network with hops coming into "existence" (= connection to the networks) and vanishing (= leaving it). This fucks up routing majorly. I don't think that I have to extend this further.

I think this is very sad. I wanted to troll this story by posting that Poor has no clue and the superior mesh network theory is rubbish, but then I had to notice that this is in fact the case.