Overview of Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) introduce a new paradigm ‎of wireless broadband Internet access by providing high data ‎rate service, scalability, and self-healing abilities at 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. 