SAN JOSE, Calif. — Engineers from Cisco Systems Inc. and Intel Corp. are trying to kick off an effort to standardize mesh networks, one of the hottest new segments in wireless. The move comes as a handful of startups are hitting the market with proprietary mesh networking technologies embedded in their homegrown ASICs and software.
A study group for a mesh standard will have its first meeting in January at the next IEEE 802 meeting in Vancouver, according to Steve Conner, a wireless engineer in Intel's corporate R&D labs who is helping organize the event. Conner and Peter Ecclesine, a corporate R&D engineer at Cisco, helped organize the group which is open to any 802 members.
Some analysts and observers applauded news of the move, but a handful of startups rolling out their own mesh approaches including BelAir Networks (Kanata, Ontario), Firetide (Los Gatos, Calif.) and Strix Systems (Westlake Village, Calif.) expressed doubts such a standard will succeed.
Wireless meshes, typically self-configuring ad hoc networks of 802.11 access points, have become a hot topic with the rapid rise of wireless LANs. Meshes are seen as quick and easy ways for both businesses and public hot spot operators to stitch together many small 802.11 networks into much larger ones.
But mesh network products coming to market from more than half dozen companies are not interoperable. "My fear is that over time this will lead to a fragmented market," said Conner of Intel. The Internet Engineering Task Force is developing multiple protocols for mesh networking, but none of them are optimized for the variable links found in 802.11 nets, and thus are not likely to be suitable for use in the standard, Conner said.
The standard could also deliver a more efficient means of mesh networking for 802.11 nets than currently exists, he added. "The 802.11 protocol was not designed with mesh as a primary use, the MAC [media access controller] is inefficient across multiple hops, and my fear is most meshes would be inefficient and waste the spectrum available," said Conner.
A standard could define a way to capture and control network statistics to assist mesh links or even provide a full-blown mesh protocol. The January meeting will be the first attempt by a study group to define what areas a standard should address as part of a subsequent IEEE task group. The entire effort could take three years, said Conner who is developing at Intel a mesh protocol that could span 802.11 and ultrawideband networks.
"It's not too early to be starting a standards effort in this area," said Craig Mathias, a consultant for Farpoint Group (Ashland, Mass.). "Meshes represent probably the next great architecture going forward in wireless. They solve problems in availability, reliability, load balancing, performance and throughput, though they do exact a toll in power," Mathias added.
"A standard for meshes is a great idea," agreed Roger Durand, director of RF systems architecture for Propagate Networks (Acton, Mass.), a developer of software that enables mesh networking on Atheros 802.11 chip sets. "Mesh networking is great for anything mobile on a large scale like emergency services or smart highways, things some people say are still pie-in-the-sky but are really just over the next hill," he added.
Many startups in the field disagreed about the need for a mesh standard. "It sounds good but it's not so easy," said Bob Jordan, vice president of marketing for Strix Systems.
The startup started shipping for business users in July small, stackable 802.11 access points that form mesh networks. The company claims its systems use a unique discovery algorithm that constantly polls the throughput, error rate, latency and other features of RF links to make sure they are creating an optimal mesh while using only one percent of the net's bandwidth for the polling.
"It's become a very interesting engineering problem to run a mesh, but if you create a standard you risk coming up with a lowest common denominator product and performance will take a hit," Jordan said.
David Park, director of systems design for BelAir Networks, agreed. The startup has developed its own enhanced 802.11a chip sets and software to create access points that use three radios to provide on a point-to-point backhaul link 54 Mbits/second at ranges from one to ten miles. The systems — aimed at large service providers, apartment buildings, convention centers and airports — are now in trials with several North American users.
Ike Nassi, founder and chief technology officer of startup Firetide, said trying to create a mesh-networking standard "is like trying to mix and match ports from Cisco and Nortel switches-it's never been done."
Fireside will launch on January 5 its HotPoint 1000S wireless mesh router which creates an 802.11b mesh linking multiple off-the-shelf access points. The system uses proprietary software based on technology developed by SRI that makes a mesh network appear like a multiport Ethernet switch.
The Firetide software essentially puts a wrapper around incoming packets to store information such as a client's MAC address. The code runs on an embedded X86 single-board computer.
"It's true we don't interoperate with other mesh networks, but there's a lot of things we do that the other guys don't to make mesh networking easy to use," said Nassi.
