What is Wireless Mesh Networking?

Wireless mesh networking is a technology that uses radio frequencies (RF) to interconnect access points that build a seamless and fault tolerant communications infrastructure. Mesh networking can be deployed any any tier of the Smart Grid network, including the WAN for distribution, NAN for metering, and HAN for consumer. At any tier, a mesh network forms an interconnect grid with the intelligence to provide a reliable communications infrastructure.

Automatic Node Discovery

Whenever a new mesh node is added to the network, it is automatically detected and establishes links with other devices that surround it. This makes deploying the mesh network remarkably simple.

Coverage Extension

A mesh network allows the easy expansion of a network’s coverage area. Each additional mesh node that is deployed extends the network and provides additional paths to enhance redundancy and fault tolerance.

Optimized Best-Path Routing

To ensure optimal performance throughout the network, a mesh network uses a best-path routing algorithm that considers every link’s capacity and number of hops. This algorithm ensures efficient RF utilization by only using optimal best-path for traffic flows and reserving alternate paths as standby.

Dynamic Rerouting

The mesh network constantly analyzes the links to ensure optimal efficiency and dynamically adapts to changes in the mesh network. Any change in link state causes the algorithm to dynamically recalculate best-path routes to determine optimal paths. Therefore, whether links are added, removed, or change, the mesh makes sure that the network is tuned for peak performance and availability.

Scalable Capacity

A mesh network makes it simple to scale capacity. Adding mesh gateways linearly scales capacity and provides additional network paths, which allows the dynamic routing algorithm to use these new routes to dynamically balance the traffic across the different mesh networks. The result is an easy increases in network-wide capacity.

Self-Healing Failover Routing

If any mesh node fails or loses connectivity, the algorithm automatically finds an alternate path and dynamically recalculates routes to find the best path to traverse the network. This provides redundancy and fault tolerance to maximize network uptime.