Scalable Video Streaming in Wireless Mesh Networks for Education

Technology Of Wmn

Other than WLAN, ZigBee (Kinney, 2003), ultra-wideband (UWB) (Yang & Giannakis, 2004) and WiMAX (Vaughan-Nichols, 2004) can also form wireless mesh networks. However, the WMNs based on WLAN are the most widely used technology in commercial environment. That’s why we pay attention to it in this paper. A typical wireless mesh network consists of two types of nodes: the mesh router and the mesh client. The mesh routers, which comprise of the backbone of the wireless mesh network, have the routing function to support the mesh network and some of them work as gateways to connect to the Internet; the mesh clients are the end users of the network. The typical architecture is illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

Typical architecture of WMN

As shown in Figure 1, the mesh routers form the backbone of the wireless network. Each mesh router has an interface to connect to other routers. In addition, some of them have interfaces that can be used to connect to the Internet, and some others have interfaces to serve the end user. The mesh clients can be static or mobile.

The key characteristics of a wireless mesh network are explained as follows: