Subject: [manet] differences and similarities between MANETs and mesh networks

From: Claudio Lavecchia <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 16:01:32 +0100

Hello everybody,

I would like to open a short discussion on the theme: "differences and 
similarities between MANETs and mesh networks".
A lot of literature exists on MANETs and mesh networks (for definitions 
you could for example refer to 
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ruffino-conn-scenarios-00.txt). 
Those two very popular paradigms share a lot of common aspects. In 
detail, the aspect that tends to link those two paradigms is their 
self-organizing nature.
For a network, being self-organizing essentially means being able to 
react to some particular situations such as, for example, changes in 
topology, without any administrator intervention.
IMHO the self-organizing nature of both MANETs and mesh networks, hides 
some important differences, tough, that I will try to detail in the 
following.
What makes MANETs very different from other networking paradigms is the 
lack of infrastructure and the high mobility of network nodes (which 
involves limited node power). From a MANET perspective, 
self-organization is essential to enforce routes persistence over time. 
In other words, self-organization makes MANETs self-healing with respect 
to link breakdowns caused by nodes mobility.
On the other hand, in the mesh networks paradigm or at least in one of 
its declinations, infrastructure exixts: mesh routers are wireless 
routers that are fixed. In a similar network architecture, 
self-organization is leveraged to achieve completely different goals 
which are congestion tolerance and mitigation of near-far problem.
*Congestion tolerance:* Self-organization should make a mesh network 
capable to avoid the use of congested nodes to route the traffic within 
the network.
*Mitigation of near-far problem: *When intermediate and redundant mesh 
routers are added in a mesh network architecture, physical distances 
decrease, and the transfer bitrate between two nodes increases. Using a 
path which is longer in terms of number of hops might lead to have a 
smaller Round Trip Time.

Now what is confusing to me is that in literature, mesh networks are 
often treated as a sub-case of MANETs to the point that often the same 
routing algos are proposed for the two paradigms. It seems pretty clear 
to me that the routing algos for those two paradigms should rely on 
different metrics. I would like to have opinions on this topic and I 
would like as well to have references (both research and technological 
such as company sites) to existing  routing  protocols  and solutions  
especially tailored for mesh networking.

Thanks a lot

Claudio

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From: "Dr. Dmitri Perkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 09:21:27 -0600 (CST)

Hi Claudio,

Here are some useful links:

A survey on mesh can be found at
  www.ece.gatech.edu/research/labs/bwn/mesh.pdf

Also see a multi-radio Mesh AP and various technical documents at
  http://www.meshdynamics.com/

Dmitri

==================================================
Dr. Dmitri Perkins, Assistant Professor
The Center for Advanced Computer Studies
University of Louisiana at Lafayette

office: (337)482-6732	fax: (337)482-5791
http://www.cacs.louisiana.edu/~perkins
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