Wireless Mesh Network at PEC

A 46 lakh research project funded by Department of Information Technology in the Ministry of Communications & IT of the Government of India has been awarded to PEC University of Technology in early 2009 to be executed in 18 months.
As a part of the project a state of the art academic testbed of Wireless Mesh Network has been setup at PEC University of Technology. The testbed consists of five wireless mesh points connected to one wireless mesh portal providing the mesh gateway for access to internet.
Prior to the above mentioned testbed, the institute had marginal network connectivity to the faculty residences. The only choice available was ADSL connectivity. Wireless connectivity was desirable as most of the faculty members have laptops at homes. Traditional wireless connectivity through Access Points required a wired backbone and placement of switches and laying down cables.  It was thus challenging to provide wireless connectivity which did not require laying of cables. The above problem was solved by creating a state of the art wireless mesh resulting in a robust, secure and easy connectivity to the above users as the mesh APs can be plugged onto the electrical poles without having any need to stretch Ethernet cables unlike wifi Access Points. The locations of the wireless mesh points were decided after conducting a site survey. The Mesh Networking was done using the Orinoco Mesh APs which supports structured Mesh networking. In a Mesh network, access points use their wireless interface as a backhaul to the rest of the network.

Access points(APs)connected directly to the wired infrastructure are called “Portals;” Mesh Access Points relay packets to other Mesh Access Points to reach the Portal, dynamically determining the best route over multiple “hops.” Mesh networks are self-configuring and self-healing . The Mesh APs use the ORiNOCO Mesh Creation Protocol (OMCP) for creating wireless mesh network. The formation of a Proxim ORiNOCO mesh network begins as soon as the Wi-Fi cell is turned on. Wi-Fi cells cannot sense that they have a direct network connection and hence begin an automatic discovery process. Secure links to the other mesh APs are created using secure AES encryption and authentication. OMCP then determines the most efficient path through the mesh, taking into account the traffic load, link speed, signal strength, number of hops and other parameters. Based on this calculation, specific routes from each mesh AP to mesh portal APs  are set up.

“The Wireless Mesh Network was required to be deployed as a part of the sponsored project in order to perform experiments relating to the draft 802.11s standard and hence for conducting real time experiments and testing and validation of results so obtained,” said Prof. Divya, Chief Investigator of the sponsored project at PEC University of Technology. With this mesh, we are able to deploy secure, scalable and reliable wireless connectivity which was much needed.”

“In addition to serving as an experimental testbed, the university’s wireless mesh network is also being used for providing wireless connectivity to the residential areas of faculty of PEC University of Technology. Such a mesh can then be replicated for other solutions such as wireless video surveillance in nearby cities, WISPs, and city-wide wireless networks,” said Dr. Sanjeev Sofat, Professor and Head, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, PEC University of Technology.

"We are grateful to the Indian Government for providing the research grant to test and validate the experimental mesh network and to showcase the technology at our campus. The facility of residential wireless connectivity through mesh is currently under testing phase and we hope that the results obtained later will be encouraging” said Dr. Manoj Datta, Director, PEC University of Technology.“The project shall help in identifying more research problems and issues in both design and development of secure mesh networks so that existing security approaches can be integrated in some way so that they can work together to achieve desired security“ said Dr. Sanjeev Sofat.

The scope of this project will be primarily to secure the environment of wireless mesh networks so that the city wide networks can be securely designed, deployed and used for information sharing“ said Prof. Divya, Chief Investigator.