Wireless Mesh Infrastructure Supporting Broadband Internet with Multimedia Services

Wireless mesh infrastructure provides for attractive solutions to telecommunication services, where larger network capacity for broadband wireless Internet may be realized by spatial spectrum re-use, and lower network costs may be realized by the saving of cable/fiber backhaul on wireless stations. However, state-of-the-art technologies suffer from scalability limitations, where dataflow quality of service (QoS), e.g., throughput and end-to-end delay, can degrade fast with the number of wireless hops. In this paper, we show a novel architecture of opportunistic mesh (OPM), based on the large-scale cognitive networking technologies, which can resolve aforementioned problems. The concept is to opportunistically utilize network resources including both spectrum bandwidth and mesh station/radio availability, so as to achieve reliable QoS for real-time traffics (e.g., of multimedia services). An extensive study reports the seamless integration with Internet protocols, as well as a proof-of-concept prototype and experiment results.