Abstract

With an IEEE 802.11 wireless networks operating in Point-to-Multipoint mode being the most popular WLAN access technology employed today, it can be expected that a Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) based on the technology can provide significant advantages for such network systems. The IEEE 802.11s standard amendment provides the comprehensive set of mechanisms required to implement and deploy a WMN utilizing this widely popular technology. With a clear priority being assigned to compatibility with both higher layer protocols and external ISO-OSI layer 2 network systems, it seems that such solution should be an easy to deploy and a robust one. However, due to some design decisions aiming to provide such a compatibility level and to keep the new mechanisms easy to implement, the resulting WMN specification exhibits severe limitation to is robustness and efficiency. The dissertation provides an analysis of these limitations and proposes a numer of cross-layer integration mechanisms intended to remove tchem, making the WMN system a resilient and efficient network access technology, surpassing in its robustness classic IEEE 802.11 Point-to-Multipoint access systems.

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