Design, deployment, and management of high-capacity large-scale wireless networks

Users are coming to expect ubiquitous access to bandwidth-intensive and delay-sensitive Internet-based applications, such as audio/video streaming and file sharing. Unfortunately, traditional access solutions, such as cellular networks and WiFi hotspots, fail to meet this growing demand because they cannot provide large coverage and high-throughput access simultaneously. Multi-hop wireless mesh networking is a promising technology that can help fill this void. Wireless mesh networks are inexpensive to build, easy to deploy, and can operate reliably in harsh environments.; We envision a future where enterprise mesh networks provide wide-area, seamless network connectivity and have the network capacity to handle growing number of users and their diverse applications. The state of the art in mobile networking fails to realize this vision because we lack effective solutions to five key challenges in mesh networking that must first be addressed. These five challenges are capacity provisioning, efficient routing, simplified network configuration, seamless mobility management, and effective network monitoring.; This dissertation offers a comprehensive and practical network architecture that incorporates innovative systems solutions to these challenges. Our contributions to the first challenge include the Split Wireless Router architecture, a modular router hardware design and "plug-and-play" software solution that allows easily-extensible multi-radio wireless mesh networks to be constructed; and two capacity management solutions that increase network capacity by intelligently tuning the router's radios to orthogonal frequencies that reduce overall signal interference. We address the challenge of efficient routing with AODV-ST, a low-overhead routing protocol that discovers high-throughput routes with zero-latency. We simplify network management (the third challenge) with a secure auto-configuration protocol that operates at the IP layer. To address the challenge of seamless user mobility, this dissertation offers two practical mobility schemes. Our first scheme is based on the well-known MobileIP standard. Our second scheme utilizes DHCP for its operation. The final challenge of network monitoring is addressed with DAMON and vicinity sniffing, two tools offered in this dissertation.; Our work significantly advances the state-of-the-art in mobile networking. We believe our contributions bring us closer to realizing the vision of ubiquitous high-capacity enterprise mesh networks.