Wireless Mesh Networks - Reliability and Flexibility

With the increasing use of wireless sensor networks in industrial settings, a new type of network topology, mesh networks, has emerged in today's market. The success of wireless networks in every field has made wireless networks, an emerging key technology for the next generation wireless networking. The various features of wireless mesh networks have attracted the research community, which led to the rapid growth of this technology, inspiring many applications. Many challenging technical issues still exist in this field. This paper compares the reliability and flexibility of the mesh network with other two traditional wireless network topologies, namely point-to-point and point-to-multipoint networks, and illustrates why and how the mesh network has advantages in these areas with the help of a case study.