matkey:
Im after some help on mesh networks…using WiFi.
The company I work for is building a device to go ito hospitals that basically acts as a bridge between our own chip radios and TCP/IP. The unit has Ethernet and WiFi on it already - not all hospitals have WiFi, so our fallback is Ethernet. No problems so far. Sounds so simple doesnt it!
Problem is that our customer we are developing this for, has come back and said that after lots of trials, there isnt the capacity on the hospital WiFi networks to support what we are trying to do. Oh crap!
Customer started talking about adding mesh networking to the device, when one of our team suggested using the WiFi in AdHoc mode and building the mesh on top of this. Sounds good, no additional hardware cost…just more software fun 
If we create out own mesh (bad idea - dont want to reinvent the wheel) then we would have to get it FDA certified as its a medical product. To anyone who hasnt worked in medical development…this is bad…very bad. Lots and lots and lots of paperwork 
So…does anyone by chance know of any FDA certified Mesh Networking software we could license? Or at least point me in the right direction of some good mesh papers I can read up on? Looked at Wikipedia and theres about 40-50 different alrogithms…dont fancy reading that lot!
lots of broadband mesh network vendors. There is no standard though. So all are 100% proprietary.
In general, one uses a mesh ONLY when getting cat-5 to numerous access points is infeasible.
The 802.11s meshing standard seems hopelessly mired in committee.
Many do meshing using 802.11b/g and a proprietary network layer protocol. Some do 802.11b/g access point functions on 2.4GHz and then interconnect the devices as a mesh using the same 802.11 radio but with a different network protocol. So the one radio does user access and mesh backhaul. THis is cheap but throughput suffers. Other products are an 802.11 access point and a second radio in the device does a mesh backhaul on 5.8GHz with 802.11a as the MAC/PHY and again a proprietary mesh atop that.
Some prominent suppliers
Tropos Networks
Cisco (has a meshing product)
Nortel (er, past tense)
Firetide
and a dozen mom-and-pop guys.
And some student designed mesh protocols used with 802.11 products.
In My Experience, extensive, it all starts with the Hospital’s policies for
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HIPPA compliance for wireless networks (big, big deal)
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User authentication policy (derived from their existing LAN remote access policy)
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Policy on disrupting medical equipment such as in the cardiac telemetry floor/ward - these are hyper-conservative rules
So these have to be dealt with before looking at solutions. It’s a hard process for anything wireless.