Design of a UMTS/GPRS Assisted Mesh Network (UAMN)

Abstract

Wireless Mesh or multi-hop networks (WMNs) are well known thanks to its simplicity on deployment and the lack of infrastructure. These two advantages come with some drawbacks. WMNs have limitations with the support of Quality of Service (QoS), they do not assure coverage or even connectivity, and security, management and monitoring are not considered key requirements. In order to benefit of mesh networks and use them as an operator graded network, it is necessary to either improve mesh networks to fulfill all these requirements or use an alternative network that offers full availability, connectivity and security to assist the mesh network. Considering the two options, the second is the one selected making use of GPRS/UMTS as an assistant network. The document describes a set of requirements and the design of the functionalities needed to build an operator graded network using the cellular GPRS/UMTS. The aspects covered in the design are: security, quality of service, mobility, self configuration and optimization. The last point, optimization, is not directly involved with mesh networking, but it is an improvement easy to achieve when using a gateway node to access the Internet through a GPRS/UMTS connection. The design of the solution not only considers functionality, but also feasibility employing of the shelve elements. The mesh nodes and gateways are built on top of Linux operating system with the aim to reuse previous results and open source software. The final objective of the project is to build a usable system to be used as a proof of concept.