Cisco To Unveil Wireless Mesh Hardware

An anonymous reader writes "CRN is reporting that Cisco will enter the wireless mesh networking fray next week. Since aquiring Airespace Cisco has been working hard to bring their own mesh technology to fruition. The new solution will target businesses who wish to move the traditional Wi-Fi network outside and possibly cover large regions."

Comments

Mesh...

[tradiuz]

Wont there at some point become a serious issue of collisions, noise, and the like if everyone decides to make their own "wireless mesh network"?

Cost

[Rinnt]

I'm all for wireless mesh network competition, but do any of you think this could help bring the cost down? I recently had some involvement in a public safety wireless deployment project. As much as I wanted to see mesh happen, it was just simply cost prohibitive. Prices ranged from $75,000 to $150,000 per square mile. And while other solutions are out there, it's hard to get a good signal in rough terrian. The final solution? Private RF with a blazing 33Kbps connection!

Hmmm...

[Jerry Coffin]

It'll be interesting to see how much different this really is from a cell phone network. Cell phones have already handled (for well over a decade) things like handing an active call off from one access point to the next. Typical wireless networks, by contrast, don't handle this well at all, and until/unless they start to, they'll remain far short of their potential.

Of course, the other direction works as well: cell networks providing faster access. Unfortunately, most cell providers seem (to me) to be shooting themselves in the foot, charging far too high of prices for data access. IMO, they'd be better off trying to maximize market share in this segment by selling the service at near break-even pricing. I did a bit of math a while back, and figured that at least from one provider, each bit of "data" cost something like 5 times as much to transmit as each bit of "voice" -- strange, at least IMO.

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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.

Re:Hmmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Mesh networks and cellular networks, while they aim for the same blanket-coverage goal, are totally different architectures.

The point of a mesh network is that not all the nodes in the mesh need a dedicated internet connection -- the packets from one node are routed along the mesh of peer wireless nodes until they reach an uplink/outside-world connection.

In cellular, each tower has to have its own backhaul connection -- lots of voice circuits, some data lines -- and each client device ("phone") connects only with the tower. In mesh networking, the "tower" and the "phone" are sort of merged -- every device has power, a radio, and some intelligence about how to get packets through the web of friendly meshed devices. A hypothetical mesh cell-phone tower would extend its range to out-of-range devices by routing the call from phone to phone, all within range of each other, until it reached a phone in range of the tower. Your phone would be used for other people's calls.

Whether the mesh architecture has a practical advantage over cellular-style base-station-with-clients has yet to be seen. In fluid situations like disaster relief, battlefields, temporary office setups, etc where it isn't possible or doesn't make sense to establish extensive permanent infrastructure, mesh networking can really outshine the wire-every-base-station approach. But for more permanent setups? Hard to say.

Nothing like traditional cellular networks

[slashdotmsiriv]

Mesh networking is nothing like cellular networks. In mesh networks each node participates in the routing process, relaying packets intended for other receivers. Of course this is not the case with traditional cellular networks where routing takes place only in the based stations and the core network connecting the base stations. Furthermore, mesh (also called ad-hoc) networks are self-configurable and self-healing. You throw the nodes over an area and they themselves discover who their neighbors are, discover routes to other nodes in the network using distributed on demand or proactive routing protocols, and if a link fails they can automatically reconfigure their routing tables. Since nodes relay packets destined to other nodes, the range of the covered area can increase with the number of appropriately located devices, unlike cellular networks where the range is solely determined by the base station (BS) and phones' antenna transmission range. There is virtually no single point of failure as is the BS for traditional cell networks. Issues like hand-over are usually handled by the mesh network gateways. The defining steps on the subject were done by researchers at UC berkeley and xbow http://www.xbow.com/Products/Wireless_Sensor_Netwo rks.htm. Another pioneering company in the field of mesh networking is Embernet www.embernet.com, these guys developed commercial h/w and s/w for this purpose more than 3 years ago.

Re:Nothing like traditional cellular networks

[Jerry Coffin]

Mesh networking is nothing like cellular networks.

Oh, I realize from a technical viewpoint they're entirely different -- but I also realize that from the viewpoint of using them, the primary differences are speed and cost; minor (!) details like who assigns addresses or how the data is routed after it gets to the ground station clearly make a big difference in how you design the network, but are (hopefully) transparent in how you use them.

Realistically, it's true that somewhere between those, you get the job of deploying the network, and here it still makes a big difference -- particularly, in most cases, Joe Blow won't be able to install a network himself if he has to program in the handoff partners manually.

Nonetheless, an awful lot of people get a professional to do at least major parts of network installation, and for somebody who has a clue of what they're doing, this wouldn't make a big difference in most circumstances -- you program them in once, and only mess with things when you have to replace something. Of course, being from Cisco these boxes will undoubtedly require at least a dozen commands to do anything, (or entries at a GUI designed specifically to make a command line seem as straightforward as possible) but that's just Cisco, and really has nothing to do with mesh networking...

--
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.

traditional Wi-Fi network

[Eightyford]

"traditional Wi-Fi network"

It's words like these that show us just how fast technology is being developed.