Subject: [manet] Difference between Mesh Networks and Ad Hoc Networks?

From: Leon Martin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 11:06:51 -0700 (PDT)

Thanks.

- Leon

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From: Claudio Lavecchia <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Jun 2005 15:56:06 +0200

Well, to me the answer is a little bit more complex than outlined in the 
previous answers.

MANETs are networks that are:

Made of mobile and power constrained nodes
Infrastructureless
Self organizing to a certain degree
Made of peer entities (all the nodes share the same functions with 
respect to the network operation, i.e. there is no node that is in 
charge for authentication or security services, for example).

The case of  Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) is slightly more subtle.
To me a wireless mesh network is a network that exploits the nodes 
redundancy of nodes and the self-organizing network paradigm to overcome 
some problems that are inherent to wireless networks (tradeoff between 
distance and transfer rates) or to networks in general (congestion, 
configuration and installation costs).

Applying the above definition of WMN, you may find that both MANETs and 
WMN are "self-organizing", but you could also argue that MANETs can be 
seen as a subset of WMN.
In the interesting "Wireless Mesh Networks: a survey" 
(http://www.ece.gatech.edu/research/labs/bwn/mesh.pdf) for example, you 
will find that what is called a "Client WMN" (Fig.4) is in effect a MANET.
The most interesting application of WMN, tough is probably the use of 
wireless nodes (both mobile or fixed) to convey traffic from mobile 
users that have a wireless device to the wired internet (see "Wireless 
Mesh Networks: a survey", Figures 3 and 5).

I hope this doesn't drive you ever more confused...

Claudio