| A wireless mesh network is an emerging paradigm in the field of wireless networking technologies ranging from personal area networks (PANs) to wide area networks (WANs). This dissertation focuses on wireless mesh personal area networks (WMPANs) and addresses some key issues of WMPANs, including medium access control (MAC), scheduling and midware, addressing, routing, and security.; The IEEE standard, 802.15.4, defines the physical (PHY) layer and MAC sublayer specifications for low rate WMPANs. An in-depth performance study is conducted to help IEEE to verify and/or improve the design and facilitate researchers and manufacturers to develop products based upon this new standard. Some problems are identified and remedies are suggested. New approaches such as transmission scheduling and medium access midware are also studied. While most research work concentrates on low rate WMPANs, a parallel and accumulative reception scheme using code division multiple access (CDMA) is proposed for high rate WMPANs and other high rate wireless mesh networks.; At the core of WMPANs lies the design problem for efficient and scalable routing algorithms. Given the constraints on storage and power supply, most existing routing protocols are too cumbersome for WMPANs. An adaptive block addressing (ABA) scheme is proposed for logic address assignment and network autoconfiguration purpose. By binding logic addresses to the network topology, routing can be done without going through route discovery. Several routing protocols, all based on ABA, are designed and evaluated, including adaptive robust tree (ART) routing, meshed ART (MART) routing, dual routings, and topology-guided distributed link state (TDLS) routing.; Security is another problem that should be solved before WMPANs can be pervasively deployed. A systematic analysis of the threats faced by WMPANs is performed. Problems with the security functions and service functions of the current WMPAN architecture are covered and solutions are provided. A new security architecture based on a lightweight public key scheme, called Derivable Public Key (DPK), is also proposed. In DPK, each device only needs to obtain the public key of the trust center and its own secret key. These two keys enable a device to communicate securely with any other device. |
