Wireless mesh networking is a very promising technology to
provide wireless broadband access. This thesis presents a novel scheme to build
a wireless mesh network with mobility support in IPv6. One great feature of the
scheme is that nodes in the mesh network are built
from off-the-shelf hardware, and support standard configured wireless clients
without modifying any software and hardware. The proposed mesh network consists
of two parts, the backbone and local footprints. Each mesh node functions as a
wireless router, and the Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) is
employed as the routing protocol. And each mesh node
also works as an intelligent Access Point (AP), which provides access to
wireless clients in the local footprint.
An implementation of the novel scheme fully integrates the mesh backbone and local footprint. Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol for IPv6 (DHCPv6) is deployed in the proposed IPv6 network, which provides zero-conf to visiting wireless clients.
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first implemented wireless mesh network that offers these salient features. A testbed is built based on this implementation. Furthermore, we are considering the deployment of such a mesh network in the real world.