Research on Wireless Mesh Node.

Funding source: Riset Unggulan ITB 2007
Research Report Link

Nowadays we see a rich and rapidly developed telecommunication terminal which is equipped by wireless access capability such as notebook, PDA, hand phone etc. Generally speaking, people using those devices to access the network through an access point.
In the situation where there is no telecommunication infrastructure, for instance in a natural disaster or battle field, it will be very helpful if the wireless nodes can talk to each other and forward the packets from a certain location to another ones without the help from centralized control such as an access point. We can build this kind of communication by using wireless mesh networks technology.
Wireless mesh network is one implementation of ad hoc network which is a distributed system consists of static wireless nodes that can form and maintain the network among each other without centralized control or base stations. Wireless ad hoc network perform self organizing freely and dynamically. IEEE802.11-based wireless local area network can be used as the platform for wireless mesh network.
In this research we build a wireless mesh node. It acts as a traffic source as well as a router. In this first stage (version) we build the node on Mini-ITX platform and we use AODV (Ad Hoc On-demand Distance Vector) routing protocol.

The hardware target of our wireless mesh node implementation is the VIA EPIA Mini-ITX ML6000EA with Intel 686 as its processor. To make it a wireless mesh node, we added IEEE802.11 b/g wireless network interface card, RAM of 256 MB DDR2. For storage media, we avoid using devices that contain moving components to make the node portable. So we use Disk on Module (DOM) of 512 MB as the media storage. Actually, beside the DOM, we can also use a USB flash disk for the storage device.