At a conference more than three years ago, I presented a list of wireless technologies that I thought would be the most important during this decade. One that didn't generate much controversy was self-organizing mesh-structured wireless networks, but I suspect this paucity of debate was essentially a function of the general lack of familiarity with the concepts, benefits and challenges of meshes. I really don't know of any topic in wireless that isn't controversial, and meshes are certainly no exception.

Meshes fall into a number of categories. Self-organizing meshes establish and update backhaul and interconnection on the fly; static meshes are usually set up by administrators and rarely reconfigured. Meshes can be infrastructure, client or hybrid; in a hybrid mesh there is no real differentiation between a client node and an infrastructure node.

They can be fixed or mobile, and designed to handle essentially any geography or throughput requirement. We're even seeing a number of companies building what we're calling micromeshes for telemetry and control applications. Given the flexibility of the architecture, one wonders why meshes aren't seeing greater application at this point.

Part of the reason is that traditional cellular architectures are field-proven and a safe bet in most cases. And part is that a number of mesh vendors have targeted metropolitan-area access as their key market, and we've seen less wireless broadband installed than might have been expected by now. A more technical issue has been how to schedule traffic through a mesh so as to optimize throughput and provide for some form of bounded latency. The latter is critical if one is going to support voice or other isochronous communications through a mesh.

Ignoring this issue for the moment, I think one near-term application that is ideal for meshes is public wireless-LAN deployments. And the reason for that is simple: Backhaul costs can be minimized during startup, when there are few users anyway, and more backhaul capacity can be added dynamically as demand grows over time. Installation costs are low, and the hardware is cheap.

So, look for meshes to play a major role in public WLANs. While it won't challenge cellular for a while, mesh is on the verge of at least modest success.

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