Wireless mesh standard nears

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 16 March 2006 16:20

Business IT - Technology

According to US website, TelecomWeb, The IEEE standards group working on a new variant of 802.11wireless local area network standard covering mesh wireless networks has passed a key milestone with the adoption of a single proposal as the basis for the new standard.

The new standard - to be called 802.11s - will define a protocol for auto-configuring paths between access points in a wireless distribution system.

According to TelecomWeb the working group was faced with 15 proposals for the standard when it first met in July 2005. By September 2005, only four remained, and those had been whittled down to two sets of ideas in January 2006. .

"The teams coalescing around those two proposals were formidable. The first was the Wi-Mesh Alliance (WiMA), created last year and led by Nortel," it said. Members include Accton Technology, ComNets, InterDigital Communications, NextHop Technologies, Nortel, Philips, Extreme Networks, MITRE, Naval Research Laboratory, Swisscom Innovations and Thomson. Arrayed against them was the SEEMesh group backed by Intel, Nokia, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo and Texas Instruments.

TelecomWeb reported that these two had now merged to create a single joint proposal, which the IEEE working group voted quickly to approved.

Wireless mesh networks are deployed in the downtown areas of hundreds of US cities generally under the auspices of local government to provide communications for government bodies, including police. They are not yet widespread in Australian but there is large installation, of Nortel equipment, at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia.