Tycho Bom
t.m.bom@cs.utwente.nl
ABSTRACT
The question is, how many devices can you connect to a mesh
network? Is the network performance still reasonable, if you
connect a lot of devices? What is a lot of in this case? Can
you connect 10 devices while still enjoying reasonable
performance or is the communication between 100 devices also
possible? These questions can be merged into one main
research question:
How scalable is a WiMax ad-hoc mesh network?
Keywords
1. INTRODUCTION
The last couple of years the internet is more and more going
mobile. Almost every laptop is equipped with Wi-Fi (IEEE
802.11g) [IEE03][DVK07] and a lot of cell phones can connect
to the internet via GPRS or UMTS. Like connections at home,
the mobile connections are also getting faster. The next step in
mobile access technologies is Worldwide Interoperability for
Microwave Access, WiMax (IEEE 802.16e)[IEE07][Wim07].
This promising technology can be implemented in a lot of
different devices. Not only phones, PDAs and laptops can use it
in the future, but for example also security cameras or other
household devices can take advantage of the technology. This
means that the number of devices that can be connected to
WiMax is a lot larger than the number of devices that currently
use Wi-Fi or UMTS. Devices of both standards can use WiMax
in the future [She05].
In WiMax networks you do not always need a central access
point to connect all the devices. Besides an infrastructure mode,
WiMax also supports the mesh mode. This means that all clients
together form the ad-hoc network and that every client also
functions as a router and a pass-through for other connected
devices. This extends the network coverage and can offer an
economical advantage [Tal07].
Although a lot of research on WiMax has been done, there are
still some open issues that need to be solved. Not every solution
to those issues scales very well and if WiMax is to be used
widely, it has to be very scalable. There are papers available that
describe a single solution, but more interesting is the
combination of several solutions and the scalability of those
solutions. This paper will give insight in the proposed solutions
for certain issues, compare the solutions based on certain
criteria and draw a conclusion on the scalability of those
solutions.
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be solved.
1.
2.
3.
4.
2.
3.
4.
5. SOLUTIONS
In this section each issue described in Section 3, will be further
discussed and for each issue one or more solutions will be
presented. This will be presented in the same order as presented
in section 3.
6. COMPARISON
The provided solutions for each issue are compared below.
They are compared using the criteria listed in section 4. After
the solutions to each issue are compared, a table will be given to
summarize the comparison. A + indicates that the solution has a
positive effect on the criterion and a indicates that is has a
negative effect on the criterion. If a cell is empty, the effect is
neither positive or negative.
[FY06]
Number of users
Network coverage
Configuration complexity
[CN04]
Number of users
Network coverage
Configuration complexity
[CTS03]
[HV05]
Configuration complexity
Number of users
Network coverage
[FY06]
[JFZ+05]
Configuration complexity
Number of users
Network coverage
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Georgios Karagiannis and my fellow
students for their useful reviews of this paper and their
comments.
REFERENCES
[AWW05] Akyildiz, I.F., Wang, X. and Wang, W. Wireless
mesh networks: a survey. Computer Networks, 47
(4). 445-487. (2005)
[CN04]
[CTS03]
Chen, Y.-S., Tseng, Y.-C., Sheu, J.-P. and Kuo, P.H. An on-demand, link-state, multi-path QoS
routing in a wireless mobile ad-hoc network.
Computer Communications, 27 (1).9 (2004) 27-40.
[GSS+06] Gunadi, S., Samuel, I., Salil, S.K., Quan Jun, C. and
Kun-Chan, L. Feasibility study of using mobile
gateways for providing internet connectivity in
public transportation vehicles Proceedings of the
2006 international conference on Wireless
communications and mobile computing, ACM
Press, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 2006.
[HV05]
[IEE03]
[She05]
[Tal07]
[Wim07]
http://www.wimaxforum.org/technology/documents
/wimax_forum_mobile_system_profile_v1_40.pdf
[ZTS+07] S. Zhao, K.T., I. Seskar and D. Raychaudhuri.
Routing Protocols for Self-Organizing Hierarchical
Ad-Hoc Wireless Networks WINLAB, Rutgers
University, Piscataway, (2007), 4.