Ad-hoc Mesh Network:

A wireless mesh network (WMN) is a communications network made up of radio nodes organized in a mesh topology. Wireless mesh networks often consist of mesh clients, mesh routers and gateways. The mesh clients are often laptops, cell phones and other wireless devices while the mesh routers forward traffic to and from the gateways which may but need not connect to the Internet. The coverage area of the radio nodes working as a single network is sometimes called a mesh cloud. Access to this mesh cloud is dependent on the radio nodes working in harmony with each other to create a radio network. A mesh network is reliable and offers redundancy. When one node can no longer operate, the rest of the nodes can still communicate with each other, directly or through one or more intermediate nodes.

A wireless mesh network can be seen as a special type of wireless ad-hoc network. A wireless mesh network often has a more planned configuration, and may be deployed to provide dynamic and cost effective connectivity over a certain geographic area. An ad-hoc network, on the other hand, is formed ad-hoc when wireless devices come within communication range of each other. The mesh routers may be mobile, and be moved according to specific demands arising in the network. Often the mesh routers are not limited in terms of resources compared to other nodes in the network and thus can be exploited to perform more resource intensive functions. In this way, the wireless mesh network differs from an ad-hoc network, since these nodes are often constrained by resources.

Wireless Network Architectures:

There are two architectures available, namely standalone and centrally coordinated wireless network.

Standalone architecture (Ad-hoc mode):

By using ad-hoc mode, all devices in the wireless network are directly

communicating with each other in peer to peer communication mode. No access point (routers/switches) is required for communication between devices.

For setting up ad-hoc mode, we need to manually configure the wireless adaptors of all devices to be at ad-hoc mode instead of infrastructure mode, and all adaptors must use the same channel name and same SSID for making the connection active.

Ad-hoc mode is most suitable for small group of devices and all of these devices must be physically present in close proximity with each other. The performance of network suffers while the number of devices grows. Disconnections of random device may occur frequently and also, ad hoc mode can be a tough job for network administrator to manage the network. Ad hoc mode has another limitation is that, ad hoc mode networks cannot bridge to wired local area network and also cannot access internet if without the installation of special gateways.

However, Ad hoc mode works fine in small environment. Because ad hoc mode does not need any extra access point (routers/switches), therefore it reduces the cost. Ad hoc can be very useful as a backup option for time being if network based on centrally coordinated wireless network (infrastructure mode) and access points are malfunctioning.

An ad hoc mode uses the integrated functionality of each adaptor to enable wireless services and security authentication. The characteristics of an Ad hoc wireless network are listed as below:

 All access points in the network operate independently and has own configuration file. Access point is responsible for the encryption and decryption. The network configuration is static and does not respond to changing network conditions.

Centrally Coordinated Architecture (Infrastructure mode)

The other architecture in wireless network is centrally coordinated (infrastructure mode). All devices are connected to wireless network with the help of Access Point (AP). Wireless APs are usually routers or switches which are connected to internet by broadband modem.

Infrastructure mode deployments are more suitable for larger organizations or facility. This kind of deployment helps to simplify network management, and allows the facility to address operational concerns. And resiliency is also assured

while more users can get connected to the network subsequently.

The infrastructure mode provides improved security, ease of management, and much more scalability and stability. However, the infrastructure mode incurs extra cost in deploying access points such as routers or switches.

An infrastructure mode wireless network has the characteristics as below: The wireless centralized controller coordinates the activity of access point. The controller is able to monitor and control the wireless network by automatically reconfiguring the access point parameters in order to maintain the health of the network. The wireless network can be easily expanded or reduced by adding or removing access points and the network can be reconfigured by the controller based on the changes in RF footprint. Tasks such as user authentication, fault tolerance, control of configuration, policy enforcement and expansion of network are done by the wireless network controller. Redundant access points can be deployed in separate locations to maintain control in the event of an access point or switch failure.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Mesh Networks

Advantages: Extended range with extra hop. Increased NLOS(Non Line of Sight) Coverage when one or more mesh nodes are added to go around obstacles.

Alternate paths in case of failure or performance degradation.

Dis-advantages: Increased delay introduced by multiple hops. Increased complexity of protocols (MAC, routing, management, security). Increased complexity of planning of initial coverage (network seeding).

Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing:

Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) Routing is a routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and other wireless ad-hoc networks. It is jointly developed in Nokia Research Center, University of California, Santa Barbara and University of Cincinnati by C. Perkins, E. Belding-Royer and S. Das. It is a reactive routing protocol, meaning that it establishes a route to a destination only on demand. In AODV, the network is silent until a connection is needed. At that point the network node that needs a connection broadcasts a request for connection. Other AODV nodes forward this message, and record the node that they heard it from, creating an explosion of temporary routes back to the needy node. When a node receives such a message and already has a route to the desired node, it sends a message backwards through a temporary route to the requesting node. The needy node then begins using the route that has the least number of hops through other nodes. Unused entries in the routing tables are recycled after a time.

When a link fails, a routing error is passed back to a transmitting node, and

the process repeats. Much of the complexity of the protocol is to lower the number of messages to conserve the capacity of the network. For example, each request for a route has a sequence number. Nodes use this sequence number so that they do not repeat route requests that they have already passed on. Another such feature is that the route requests have a "time to live" number that limits how many times they can be retransmitted. Another such feature is that if a route request fails, another route request may not be sent until twice as much time has passed as the timeout of the previous route request.

The advantage of AODV is that it creates no extra traffic for communication along existing links. Also, distance vector routing is simple, and doesn't require much memory or calculation. However AODV requires more time to establish a connection, and the initial communication to establish a route is heavier than some other approaches.

Technical description The AODV Routing protocol uses an on-demand approach for finding routes, that is, a route is established only when it is required by a source node for transmitting data packets. It employs destination sequence numbers to identify the most recent path. The major difference between AODV and Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) stems out from the fact that DSR uses source routing in which a data packet carries the complete path to be traversed. However, in AODV, the source node and the intermediate nodes store the next-hop information corresponding to each flow for data packet transmission. In an ondemand routing protocol, the source node floods the RouteRequest packet in the network when a route is not available for the desired destination. It may obtain

multiple routes to different destinations from a single RouteRequest. The major difference between AODV and other on-demand routing protocols is that it uses a destination sequence number (DestSeqNum) to determine an up-to-date path to the destination. A node updates its path information only if the DestSeqNum of the current packet received is greater than the last DestSeqNum stored at the node.

A RouteRequest carries the source identifier (SrcID), the destination identifier (DestID), the source sequence number (SrcSeqNum), the destination sequence number (DestSeqNum), the broadcast identifier (BcastID), and the time to live (TTL) field. DestSeqNum indicates the freshness of the route that is accepted by the source. When an intermediate node receives a RouteRequest, it either forwards it or prepares a RouteReply if it has a valid route to the destination. The validity of a route at the intermediate node is determined by comparing the sequence number at the intermediate node with the destination sequence number in the RouteRequest packet. If a RouteRequest is received multiple times, which is indicated by the BcastID-SrcID pair, the duplicate copies are discarded. All intermediate nodes having valid routes to the destination, or the destination node itself, are allowed to send RouteReply packets to the source. Every intermediate node, while forwarding a RouteRequest, enters the previous node address and its BcastID. A timer is used to delete this entry in case a RouteReply is not received before the timer expires. This helps in storing an active path at the intermediate node as AODV does not employ source routing of data packets. When a node receives a RouteReply packet, information about the previous node from which the packet was received is also stored in order to forward the data packet to this next node as the next hop toward the destination.

Advantages and disadvantages

The main advantage of this protocol is having routes established on demand and that destination sequence numbers are applied for find the latest route to the destination. The connection setup delay is lower.

One disadvantage of this protocol is that intermediate nodes can lead to inconsistent routes if the source sequence number is very old and the intermediate nodes have a higher but not the latest destination sequence number, thereby having stale entries. Also, multiple RouteReply packets in response to a single RouteRequest packet can lead to heavy control overhead. Another disadvantage of AODV is unnecessary bandwidth consumption due to periodic beaconing.