No Mesh Networking Standards Yet

An article in Mobile Pipeline (as reported by Glenn at Wi-Fi Networking News) discusses the six vendors of mesh wireless technologies—BelAir, Cisco, Firetide, Motorola (mesh division), Tropos, and Strix—and indicates that there are no standards between any of them.

We can assume that market forces as well as smart business will eventually cause these vendors and others to come to an agreement on mesh networking protocols and architecture. There’s also work being done by the IEEE 802.11 standards body to a create 802.11s mesh networking standard. And of course, it would make sense for clients—businesses and expecially municipal governments—to push these vendors to standardize their products to ensure that there’s no vendor lock in. This is particularly important for governments, and should be a criteria for any muni-wireless RFP.

Mobile Pipeline neglects to discuss the open source projects that provide well developed mesh technology. CUWiN, Freifunk, and LocustWorld integrate mesh technologies—CUWiN using Hazy Sighted Link State, Freifunk using Optimized Link State Routing, and LocustWorld using Ad hoc On Demand Distance Vector. In both of these cases these mesh networks use published, open standards for meshing.

I know I’m leaving out a number of other open source or open standard mesh networking projects. Please let me know what else should be included here.