Journal of Communications Vol. 8, No. 9, September 2013 Overview of Wireless Mesh Networks Salah A. Alabady and M. F. M. Salleh School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Seri Ampangan, 14300, Nibong Tebal, Pulau Pinang, Malaysia Email:
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[email protected] Abstract—Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) introduce a new and have a continuous power supply. They normally stay paradigm of wireless broadband Internet access by providing in static and supply connections and services to mesh high data rate service, scalability, and self-healing abilities at clients. reduced cost. Obtaining high throughput for multi-cast applications (e.g. video streaming broadcast) in WMNs is challenging due to the interference and the change of channel quality. To overcome this issue, cross-layer has been proposed to improve the performance of WMNs. Network coding is a powerful coding technique that has been proven to be the very effective in achieving the maximum multi-cast throughput. In addition to achieving the multi-cast throughput, network coding offers other benefits such as load balancing and saves bandwidth consumption. This paper presents a review the fundamental concept types of medium access control (MAC) layer, routing protocols, cross-layer and network coding for wireless mesh networks. Finally, a list of directions for further research is considered. Index Terms—Wireless mesh networks, multi-cast multi- radio multi- channel, medium access control, routing protocols, Wireless Wireless client channel assignment, cross layer, network coding. client Access I. INTRODUCTION point Nowadays, wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are Cellular Networks actively investigating with related applications and Wi-Fi services.