IEEE 802.11s

The IEEE 802.11s task group drew upon volunteers from university and industry to provide specifications and possible design solutions for wireless mesh networking.

802.11 are a set of IEEE standards that govern wireless networking transmission protocols.

They are commonly used today to provide wireless connectivity in the home, office and some commercial establishments.

[1] 802.11s extends the IEEE 802.11 MAC standard by defining an architecture and protocol that supports both broadcast/multicast and unicast delivery using "radio-aware metrics over self-configuring multi-hop topologies."

One or more routing protocols suitable to the actual network physical topology are required.

When mobile users or heavy loads are concerned, there will often be a handoff from one base station to another, and not only from 802.11 but from other (GSM, Bluetooth, PCS and other cordless phone) networks.

This is especially likely if a longer-range lower-bandwidth service is deployed to minimize mesh dead zones, e.g. GSM routing based on OpenBTS.

Thus the accompanying IEEE 802.11u standard will be required by most mesh networks to authenticate these users without pre-registration or any prior offline communication.

A year was spent clarifying and pruning until Draft D3.00 was created which reached WG approval with 79% in March 2009.

Also, mesh STAs can collocate with an 802.11 portal that implements the role of a gateway and provides access to one or more non-802.11 networks.

802.11s also includes mechanisms to provide deterministic network access, a framework for congestion control and power save.