Considering Wireless Mesh Network with Heterogeneous Multiple Radios

As 802.11a/b/g achieves great success in market, WiMAX, UWB and other new wireless connection techniques are moving into our daily life. The lower and lower cost of RF transceivers (radios) allows us to consider using two or more radios in the same device. Wireless mesh network extends the coverage of wireless network, which forwards packets between transmission pair by multiple hop retransmissions to make wireless service everywhere. Given this, we argue the wireless systems using heterogeneous multiple radios in a collaborative manner dramatically to improve the system performance and functionality over the traditional single radio wireless mesh systems. We design the system model of wireless mesh network with heterogeneous multiple radios, and outline new research topics as well as some challenges under it including handoff model for mesh client with heterogeneous multiple radios, information grasping, sharing and distribution based management and control for heterogeneous multiple radio mesh network. We also present the guidelines for designing radios metric and application requirement based routing algorithms. The new views supports that a heterogeneous multiple radio platform offers significant benefits for our future wireless systems.