Firetide, Inc.

Hughes Electronics Corporation

Sivakumar Kailas

Jorjeta Gueorguieva Jetcheva

Sachin Kanodia

Mohan Natarajan

Murali Repakula

Jorgeta Jetcheva

Stanley Edward Kay

Son K Dao

Tayyab Khan

Bo Ryu

Yougguang Zhang

Methods and systems for mobility of mobile nodes in mesh networks are taught wherein the mobile mesh nodes choose an attachment point to another mesh node based on predetermined criteria, such as the characteristics of the attachment point's path to a reference destination, and other factors local to the attachment point, such as load and available capacity. The mobile nodes forward packets on each other's behalf. Static and mobile nodes and the links between them are treated differently from each other in view of their respectively different properties. A special metric is used for paths that include mobile links in addition to the static mesh links and wired mesh links. Mobility is handled completely transparently to any client devices attached to the mesh nodes, where this attachment could be wireless or wired.

Mesh node mobility across static and mobile mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (or 'meshes') are enabled for arbitrary interconnection to each other and may provide varying levels of coverage and redundancy as desired. Interoperability between meshes having differing configurations, internal operations, or both, may be freely intermixed and inter-operated in unrestricted combination. Enhanced explicit inter-bridge control protocols operate using pre-existing control packets. Pre-existing broadcast packet floods are used to learn the best paths across interconnected meshes (termed a 'multi-mesh'). Enhanced routing protocols operating within each mesh may optionally examine information limited to the respective mesh when forwarding traffic, thus enabling robust multi-mesh scaling with respect to memory and processing time required by the routing protocols. Using assigned identifiers, forwarding loops are prevented, and optionally redundant broadcast flooding is prevented.

Techniques for enabling the efficient operation of arbitrarily interconnected mesh networks

Techniques are described for automatically determining quasi-static per-link channel assignments for each radio in multiple-hop mesh networks having nodes with two or more radios and where only a small number of channels is available for use in the network. The method optimally assigns the channels to the radios of all of the nodes in the network so as to achieve the lowest interference among links and the highest possible bandwidth.

Multi-channel assignment method for multi-radio multi-hop wireless mesh networks

A mesh network, operating as a virtual Ethernet switch, includes multiple nodes operating as Mesh Network Gateway Interfaces (mesh NGIs) enabled for communication with one or more shared access networks. Selectively coupling the multiple NGIs to the same shared access network provides redundancy and load balancing aimed at improving the reliability and performance of the network. A first architecture is based on a gateway group, including a plurality of NGIs enabled to communicate with a single shared access network via a designated broadcast server elected from among the NGIs. A second architecture is based on a plurality of (physical) NGIs enabled to communicate with a single shared access network via one or more designated nodes in the shared access network. The designated nodes, or Mesh Servers (MSs), operate as virtual NGIs, and traffic entering or exiting the mesh flows through one of the MSs, thus improving packet broadcast efficiency.

Utilizing multiple mesh network gateways in a shared access network

Wireless mesh networks (or 'meshes') are enabled for arbitrary interconnection to each other and may provide varying levels of coverage and redundancy as desired. Interoperability between meshes having differing configurations, internal operations, or both, may be freely intermixed and inter-operated in unrestricted combination. Enhanced explicit inter-bridge control protocols operate using pre-existing control packets. Pre-existing broadcast packet floods are used to learn the best paths across interconnected meshes (termed a 'multi-mesh'). Enhanced routing protocols operating within each mesh may optionally examine information limited to the respective mesh when forwarding traffic, thus enabling robust multi-mesh scaling with respect to memory and processing time required by the routing protocols. Communication scalability is improved by enabling frequency diversity across the multi-mesh by configuring meshes within interference range of each other for operation at a plurality of frequencies. Each mesh may operate at a respective non-interfering frequency.

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San Jose, CA, United States of America

Sivakumar Kailas