Research — Project Overview

Overview of the EU-MESH Project

The EU-MESH project will develop, evaluate, and trial a system of software modules for building secure and dependable wireless multi-radio multi-channel mesh networks with QoS support. To achieve this goal, the work plan involves the following phases: identification of requirements; architecture design; research and development activities for mesh configuration and link control, resource management, QoS routing, mobility, and security; integration; and finally experiments and trials.

The work plan is divided into the following seven work packages:

• WP1 - Project Management and Assessment:
  This work package performs overall project management and coordination, and quality monitoring of the project’s results.
  
  
• WP2 - Requirements and Architecture:
  This work package will define the user and application requirements, and the architecture of the EU-MESH system. The architecture definition will follow a cross-layer design principle, and will be the basis for the work performed in work packages WP3 through WP5.
  
  
• WP3 - Mesh Configuration and Link Control:
  This work package will develop procedures for automated configuration and management, efficient wireless network monitoring that supports cross-layer measurements, and mechanisms and procedures to support efficient topology control. Abstractions for the wireless link layer and basic network monitoring & control mechanisms developed here will be used in WP4 and WP5.
  
  
• WP4 - Resource, QoS, and Mobility Management:
  This work package will develop models and algorithms for efficient resource management based on cross-mechanism optimization, QoS routing metrics and opportunistic routing algorithms, and mobility support. This work package will utilize basic monitoring and control mechanisms developed in WP3.
  
  
• WP5 - Security:
  This work package will develop proactive and reactive security mechanisms for ensuring high dependability and availability of the EU-MESH network. This work package will interact with WP4 for achieving efficient wireless resource utilization while satisfying security requirements and for supporting secure QoS routing and handovers, and will utilize network monitoring & control mechanisms from WP3.
  
  
• WP6 - Experiments and Trials:
  This work package will integrate the software modules developed in WP3 through WP5 to validate their interoperability, define and execute experiments and trials in a local and a metropolitan scale, in order to qualitatively and quantitatively assess the performance gains of the developed procedures and algorithms.
  
  
• WP7 - Dissemination, Standardisation, and Exploitation:
  The goal of this work package is to disseminate the project’s results and achievements, follow and contribute to relevant standardisation activities, and exploit specific project results.

To ensure an innovative and effective contribution, the architecture design work package (WP2) will receive continuous feedback from the software modules’ design/validation/trial phases, as well as feedback from relevant standardisation activities. Based on this feedback, WP2 will adapt/modify and align, as necessary, the EU-MESH system architecture.

The implementation of the software modules will be performed within each of the three main research and development work packages (WP3-WP5). This allows a tighter feedback and iteration between the development and the implementation/validation phases, as well as a controlled interaction and alignment of the three main work areas. The implementation will follow an incremental procedure, where we first develop/validate local mechanisms, and then test the functionality involving communication between neighbouring Mesh Routers (MRs) and end-to-end communication. Implementation will be based on open software platforms (Linux, FreeBSD, etc) but also special development platforms, in order to exploit existing code and minimize the time needed to realize a functioning prototype; this will help to test the implementations as early as possible. The validation of the developed modules will be performed using simulation and controlled test-bed experimentation.

WP6 includes system integration, and the planning and execution of experiments and trials. The experiments and trials will qualitatively and quantitatively assess the performance gains of the procedures and algorithms, but will also prove the viability of the EU-MESH technology to offer a potential economic advantage.

Official EU-MESH web page.