A number of
wireless community networks have been started as
grassroots projects across the world at various points in time. Other projects, often proprietary or tied to a single institution, are: •
ALOHAnet was first used in Hawaii in 1971 to connect the islands. • Amateur radio operators began experimenting with
VHF and later
UHF digital communications networks in Canada in 1978 and the US in 1980. By 1984, the volunteer-operated
Amateur Packet Radio Network (AMPRNet) of
'digipeaters' spanned most of North America. The emerging network allowed a licensed operator using merely an early laptop computer such as
TRS-80 Model 100 and compatible
handheld FM transceiver operating in the
1.25-meter band or
2-meter band to accomplish wireless transcontinental digital communications. With the development of the Internet, portals into and out of other IP networks facilitated 'tunnels' to reach packet networks in other parts of the world. • In 1998–1999, a field implementation of a campus-wide wireless network using 802.11 WaveLAN 2.4 GHz wireless interface on several laptops was successfully completed. Several real applications, mobility and data transmissions were made. • Mesh networks were useful for the military market because of the radio capability, and because not all military missions have frequently moving nodes. The Pentagon launched the DoD
JTRS program in 1997, with an ambition to use software to control radio functions - such as frequency, bandwidth, modulation and security previously baked into the hardware. This approach would allow the DoD to build a family of radios with a common software core, capable of handling functions that were previously split among separate hardware-based radios: VHF voice radios for infantry units; UHF voice radios for air-to-air and ground-to-air communications; long-range HF radios for ships and ground troops; and a wideband radio capable of transmitting data at megabit speeds across a battlefield. However, JTRS program was shut down in 2012 by the US Army because the radios made by
Boeing had a 75% failure rate. •
Amazon eero is a Wi-Fi mesh networking system designed for use in homes and small businesses. •
Google Home and
Google Nest Wifi support Wi-Fi mesh networking. • In rural
Catalonia,
Guifi.net was developed in 2004 as a response to the lack of broadband Internet, where commercial Internet providers weren't providing a connection or a very poor one. Nowadays with more than 30,000 nodes it is only halfway a
fully connected network, but following a peer to peer agreement it remained an open, free and
neutral network with extensive redundancy. • In 2004,
TRW Inc. engineers from Carson, California, successfully tested a multi-node mesh wireless network using 802.11a/b/g radios on several high speed laptops running Linux, with new features such as route precedence and preemption capability, adding different priorities to traffic service class during packet scheduling and routing, and quality of service. Their work concluded that data rate can be greatly enhanced using
MIMO technology at the radio front end to provide multiple spatial paths. •
Zigbee digital radios are incorporated into some consumer appliances, including battery-powered appliances. Zigbee radios spontaneously organize a mesh network, using specific routing algorithms; transmission and reception are synchronized. This means the radios can be off much of the time, and thus conserve power. Zigbee is for low power low bandwidth application scenarios. •
Thread is a consumer wireless networking protocol built on open standards and IPv6/6LoWPAN protocols. Thread's features include a secure and reliable mesh network with no single point of failure, simple connectivity and low power. Thread networks are easy to set up and secure to use with banking-class encryption to close security holes that exist in other wireless protocols. In 2014 Google Inc's
Nest Labs announced a working group with the companies
Samsung,
ARM Holdings,
Freescale,
Silicon Labs,
Big Ass Fans and the lock company
Yale to promote Thread. • In early 2007, the US-based firm
Meraki launched a mini wireless mesh router. The
802.11 radio within the Meraki Mini has been optimized for long-distance communication, providing coverage over 250 metres. In contrast to multi-radio long-range mesh networks with tree-based topologies and their advantages in O(n) routing, the Maraki had only one radio, which it used for both client access and backhaul traffic. In 2012, Meraki was acquired by Cisco. • The
Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey CA, demonstrated such wireless mesh networks for border security. In a pilot system, aerial cameras kept aloft by balloons relayed real time high resolution video to ground personnel via a mesh network. •
SPAWAR, a division of the US Navy, is prototyping and testing a scalable, secure Disruption Tolerant Mesh Network to protect strategic military assets, both stationary and mobile. Machine control applications, running on the mesh nodes, "take over", when Internet connectivity is lost. Use cases include
Internet of Things e.g. smart drone swarms. • An
MIT Media Lab project has developed the
XO-1 laptop or "OLPC" (
One Laptop per Child) which is intended for disadvantaged schools in developing nations and uses mesh networking (based on the
IEEE 802.11s standard) to create a robust and inexpensive infrastructure. The instantaneous connections made by the laptops are claimed by the project to reduce the need for an external infrastructure such as the Internet to reach all areas, because a connected node could share the connection with nodes nearby. A similar concept has also been implemented by Greenpacket with its application called SONbuddy. • In Cambridge, UK, on 3 June 2006, mesh networking was used at the “
Strawberry Fair” to run mobile live television, radio and Internet services to an estimated 80,000 people. • Broadband-Hamnet, a mesh networking project used in amateur radio, is "a high-speed, self-discovering, self-configuring, fault-tolerant, wireless computer network" with very low power consumption and a focus on emergency communication. • The
Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network (CUWiN) project is developing mesh networking software based on open source implementations of the
Hazy-Sighted Link State Routing Protocol and
Expected Transmission Count metric. Additionally, the Wireless Networking Group in the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are developing a multichannel, multi-radio wireless mesh testbed, called Net-X as a proof of concept implementation of some of the multichannel protocols being developed in that group. The implementations are based on an architecture that allows some of the radios to switch channels to maintain network connectivity, and includes protocols for channel allocation and routing. •
FabFi is an
open-source, city-scale, wireless mesh networking system originally developed in 2009 in
Jalalabad, Afghanistan to provide high-speed Internet to parts of the city and designed for high performance across multiple hops. It is an inexpensive framework for sharing wireless Internet from a central provider across a town or city. A second larger implementation followed a year later near
Nairobi, Kenya with a
freemium pay model to support network growth. Both projects were undertaken by the
Fablab users of the respective cities. • SMesh is an
802.11 multi-hop wireless mesh network developed by the Distributed System and Networks Lab at
Johns Hopkins University. A fast
handoff scheme allows mobile clients to roam in the network without interruption in connectivity, a feature suitable for real-time applications, such as
VoIP. • Many mesh networks operate across multiple radio bands. For example,
Firetide and Wave Relay mesh networks have the option to communicate node to node on 5.2 GHz or 5.8 GHz, but communicate node to client on 2.4 GHz (802.11). This is accomplished using
software-defined radio (SDR). • The SolarMESH project examined the potential of powering 802.11-based mesh networks using solar power and rechargeable batteries. Legacy 802.11 access points were found to be inadequate due to the requirement that they be continuously powered. The
IEEE 802.11s standardization efforts are considering power save options, but solar-powered applications might involve single radio nodes where relay-link power saving will be inapplicable. • The WING project (sponsored by the Italian Ministry of university and Research and led by CREATE-NET and Technion) developed a set of novel algorithms and protocols for enabling wireless mesh networks as the standard access architecture for next generation Internet. Particular focus has been given to interference and traffic-aware channel assignment, multi-radio/multi-interface support, and opportunistic scheduling and traffic aggregation in highly volatile environments. • WiBACK Wireless Backhaul Technology has been developed by the
Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems (FOKUS) in Berlin. Powered by solar cells and designed to support all existing wireless technologies, networks are due to be rolled out to several countries in sub-Saharan Africa in summer 2012. • Recent standards for wired communications have also incorporated concepts from Mesh Networking. An example is
ITU-T G.hn, a standard that specifies a high-speed (up to 1 Gbit/s)
local area network using existing home wiring (
power lines, phone lines and
coaxial cables). In noisy environments such as power lines (where signals can be heavily attenuated and corrupted by noise), it is common that mutual visibility between devices in a network is not complete. In those situations, one of the nodes has to act as a relay and forward messages between those nodes that cannot communicate directly, effectively creating a "relaying" network. In G.hn, relaying is performed at the
data link layer. •
Meshtastic and
MeshCore using
LoRa in
ISM bands. ==Protocols==