Wireless 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 coverage area of the radio nodes working as a single network is sometimes called a mesh cloud.

The animation below illustrates how wireless mesh networks can self form and self heal.

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.


In this way, the wireless mesh network differs from an ad-hoc network, since these nodes are often constrained by resources.

Wireless mesh architecture is a first step towards providing cost effective and dynamic high-bandwidth networks over a specific coverage area.

Wireless mesh architectures infrastructure is, in effect, a router network minus the cabling between nodes.

Wireless mesh networks have a relatively stable topology except for the occasional failure of nodes or addition of new nodes.


Practically all the traffic in an infrastructure mesh network is either forwarded to or from a gateway, while in ad hoc networks or client mesh networks the traffic flows between arbitrary pairs of nodes.

An important possible application for wireless mesh networks is VoIP.

One of the more often cited papers on Wireless Mesh Networks identified the following areas as open research problems in 2005 - There are more than 70 competing schemes for routing packets across mesh networks.