Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Mesh Networks Overcome Traditional Communications Challenges

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 09 May 2004 09:14:06 -0400

Mesh Networks Overcome Traditional Communications Challenges

By Mickey McCarter

After the 9/11 attacks, phone calls overwhelmed cell towers.
First responders needing to use a cellular network would need
some rescuing of their own.

Mesh networks do not use a central tower, thus radios based on
them can't be overwhelmed, said Rick Rotondo, vice president of
marketing for MeshNetworks Inc.

"Mesh networks are basically a new way to build wireless radio
architectures," Rotondo said. "What I mean by that is that it is
probably best to start off with what everybody is familiar with today,
and that is a cellular network. The way that a cellular network works
is I have something like a PDA or a cell phone. If I want to talk to
someone else on a cellular network, even if they are standing right
next to me, my signal goes to the cell tower and the cell tower
retransmits that back to the person standing next to me."

A cellular network then does not provide direct connections between
individual users of the system.

A mesh network does.

"If you take that a step further, the way that mesh gets its name,
every device in the network can act as a router/repeater for every
other device on the network," Rotondo said. "So say that the person
I wanted to talk to wasn't standing right next to me, but was maybe
down the street a mile or so. What I could do is hop through other
people's devices, which would act as sort of router/relays and would
pass my transmission along to its final destination."

A cell tower can become a bottleneck if too many signals are being
transmitted to it. A mesh network routes traffic along the most open
path available.

The company MeshNetworks Inc., based in Maitland, Florida, has
introduced radios based on the technology to first responders in
Garland, Texas, and Medford, Oregon, with more to come.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency developed the
concept of the mesh network for military use in the early 1990s.

The idea was to avoid a central broadcast tower that could be lost
or damaged. In essence, each soldier becomes part of a self-forming
network. The same concept powers the Internet.

"Obviously, it turned out to be a really good idea because a lot of the
battlefield communications systems that are deployed today are based
on this sort of technology," Rotondo said. "ITT won the bake-off if you
will for this particular program and has been deploying systems in the
military. However, the guys at ITT said this also probably has some
fantastic applications in the commercial space, notwithstanding things
like public safety and homeland security. So we were formed to
commercialize this technology."

There are different ways to set up mesh networks by using either a
hardware- or software-based solution.

MeshNetworks Inc. provides first responders with radios using a
hardware solution because it best fits their needs, Rotondo argued.

"The type of solution that you are going to pick, be it hardware or
software, is really going to depend on your application and the
requirements of that application," Rotondo said. "For example, we
have deployed for public safety and homeland security the world's
largest mobile mesh networks based on what you would call a hardware
solution. The reason it was based on a hardware solution is that the
actual network requirements, the wireless requirements, were for wide
area and mobile broadband communications."

The technology also enables first responders to track each other's
locations automatically with a function called MeshTrack.

Orange County Fire and Rescue recently used MeshTrack to keep
track of firefighters inside of a burning house during a live burn
exercise.

Join Security Marketplace next week when we look at a software-based
solution for mesh networks.

http://www.homelanddefenseradio.com/marketplace.htm

http://www.meshnetworks.com

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