802.11s Wireless mesh standard gets boost from OLPC, open source

The proposed IEEE wireless
LAN mesh specification is already getting some traction, though still over
18 months from final ratification, thanks to early experimentation by the One
Laptop Per Child Foundation and a recently launched open source project.

This hands-on experience, fed back into the work of the IEEE 802.11s Task Group,
has already led to several changes in the draft standard, with other changes
being considered. When deployed, 802.11s will let different types and brands
of wireless devices find each other, interconnect securely, and forward traffic
on behalf of other mesh nodes, forging new paths automatically if nodes move
or wireless links fail. WLAN deployments will be cheaper and easier, say advocates.

PacketHop
earlier this month announced it will release in July the first commercial implementation
of the IEEE mesh draft .

The 802.11s standard promises to cut wireless networking loose from its Ethernet
cable moorings, creating what some call "opportunistic" networks.
"If you think about this underlying technology to form opportunistic connections,
it changes a lot of the assumptions of wireless LANs," says Robert Withrow,
adviser to the CTO Common Engineering Group, part of the Office of the Chief
Technology Office for Nortel Networks, which supports both the OLPC and the
open80211s
project, and was an early and active member of the 802.11s task group, which
launched in 2004.

"A piece of information might be coming from your [mesh] neighbor,"
Withrow says. "Well, who is that neighbor? Does he have a right to give
you information?" He also says that wireless networks are rapidly moving
from people-to-people connections, to people-to-machine and machine-to-machine
connections, which are vastly more numerous, dubbed by Nortel
as "hyperconnectivity." "It's difficult to do this in a hierarchical
way," he says.

Sign up for ITworld's Daily newsletter
Follow ITworld on Twitter @IT_world

• Email
• Print
• Share
  • Slashdot
  • Digg
  • Stumble
  • Reddit
  • Newsvine