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Over two decades of research has yielded many conferences, workshops and meetings focused on multi-hop wireless networks. Around the globe, hundreds of papers are published every year – there is so much research, yet so few products. While the interest in the research community continues to rise, fueled by the funding available from DARPA and NSF, the industry remains lukewarm in pursuing opportunities in multi-hop wireless networking. Researchers motivate their work using the now cliché’ disaster-emergency response, battle theatre communications, and space/planet explorations applications. Start-ups have identified a few commertial applications, however, these too are in vertical markets.
We believe there are two applications that can make mesh networking mainstream. These are: Inter-home mesh networking or Community Mesh Networking and intra-home mesh networking.
There are several advantages to enabling community mesh networks. For example, when neighbors cooperate and forward each other’s packets, they can together share faster, cost-effective Internet access via gateways distributed in their neighborhood; they can cooperatively deploy backup technology that securely and privately distributes their data in the neighborhood so users never have to worry about losing precious information due to a catastrophic disk failure; Community meshes allow bits created locally, to be used locally without having to go through a service provider and the Internet. Neighborhood networks allow faster and easier dissemination of cached information that is relevant to the local community.
Mesh Networking Summit 2004 will address the research challenges in widescale deployment and acceptance of mesh networking. Researchers with expertise in different areas will share notes and discuss remaining impediments in core technologies that need to be overcome. It is the goal of the organizers to provide researchers a set of presentations and meeting notes that articulate the future research agenda for making community mesh networking popular. We hope to stimulate future research initiatives and collaborations between university and industry researchers as we collectively strive to make mesh networking mainstream.
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Mesh Capacity WG
Meeting Room: Ballroom
Topics: Directional antennas, MAC & PHY design, interference management, multi-radio systems, channel management, link estimation, cognitive radio, power management, capacity estimation, 60 GHz wireless etc.
Group Leader: Nitin Vaidya (UIUC)
Participants: Kumar (UIUC), Kajiya (MSR), Niknejad (UCB), Wolman (MSR), Freebresyser (Honeywell), Krishnamurthy (Intel), Bahl (MSR), Sabharwal (Rice), Yao (MSR Asia), Redi (BBN), Ferrell (MS-Venice Team), Popoff (MS-Venice Team)
Mesh Connectivity WG
Meeting Room: Falls Terrice
Topics: Routing, metrics, topology control
Group Leader: David Johnson (Rice)
Participants: Garcia-Luna-Aceves (UCSC), Morris (MIT), Das (SUNY), Belding-Royer (UCSB), Srivatsava (UCLA), Draves (MSR), Zill (MSR), Padhye (MSR)
Mesh Self Management & Security WG
Meeting Room: Vintage
Topics: Information distribution, fault detection, isolation, diagnosis and management, incentives, security
Group Leader: David Wetherall (University of Washington)
Participants: Arbaugh (UMaryland), Savage (UCSD), Qiu (MSR), Adya (MSR), Jukan (NSF), Hubaux (EPFL), Kelly (MS-Venice), Burgess (MS-Venice)
Mesh Distributed Services & IP Networking WG
Meeting Room: Atrium
Topics: Clock synchronization, distributed naming services, address assignment/auto-configuration, P2P, fairness, quality of service
Group Leader: Ion Stoica (Berkeley)
Participants: Shenker (Berkeley), Kurose (UMASS), Padmanabhan (MSR), Erwin (MS), Stewart (MSR Cambridge), Ginchereau (MS-Venice)