Study And Implementation On Small Wireless MESH Router

Wireless MESH Network(WMN) is a multi-hop wireless mesh topology network, which has been widely used to protect the communications between nodes by multi-hop access methods. WMN don’t have fixed access point(AP), so any node in the network has the routing function, and can send and receive signals to directly communicate with one or more peer nodes. Now, WMN is widely used due to its advantages of flexible network structure, network high robustness, easy installation and deployment, high-bandwidth, etc. The demand of WMN platform is also growing. So it’s necessary to research on WMN Architecture and the key equipments—wireless MESH router. Wireless MESH router as an embedded systems, is composed of hardware platforms and adapted embedded operating system.In order to follow the trend of technology and achieve new breakthroughs on existing WMN architectures and key equipments, a new WMN architecture is defined and a embedded small wireless MESH router is designed. Due to its several advantages such as low price, compact, portable and high-performance, the wireless MESH router is used to solution the conflict problems of performance, cost and portability of traditional devices. The main contents are as follows:Firstly the basic concepts and scenario demands of WMN are introduced and the shortcomings of traditional equipments are analyzed to demonstrate the necessity of the research on WMN architectures and key equipments.Secondly, based on WMN functional analysis and the corresponding network design, a new and wide used WMN architecture is defined, and some specific networks are built based on it. What’s more the hardware and software demands of the key equipments are analyzed.Then,for the purposes of miniaturization, low cost and high performance, the hardware platform of a small wireless MESH router what is based on AR9331 is designed. It is described in detail, including the key chip selection, schematic design, PCB design,shell design and the accessories selection.Later,Linux-based embedded operating system Open Wrt what is the software part of the hardware device is described in detail,including its components, migration, etc. The configuration process is introduced, and only through proper configuration can this router be used to access MESH network as a MESH node and enables non-MESH clients to access MESH network.Finally, test environment is built to test performances of the MESH router and the WMN organized by the MESH routers. It’s shown that the small and low-cost MESH router in the WMN conditions has excellent performances and the desired functions, so the MESH router is confirmed to achieve the perfect fusion of performance, cost and portability.