Abstract
WMANETs are more popular and successful in the marketplace of the future wireless technology as indicated by the increasing usage of Bluetooth and Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). To aid the application of WMANETs in any wireless environment, when required, and to achieve the services demanded by the user, we need to define WMANETs as a whole object with clear syntax and semantics. In this paper we propose an
Architectural Framework for WMANETs
(
AF WMANETs
) that can be applied to WMANETs in different network environments, for example cellular systems, smart homes or smart offices. The proposed architecture presents a full description for WMANETs from three different viewpoints: Enterprise, Information, and Computational. This description improves the understanding of WMANETs properties, requirements and needs. The current challenges that face WMANETs such as: routing, security, scalability, Quality of Service (QoS), and so on can thus be easily defined and their solution can be realized. This paper provides an example of using the AF WMANETs to build a comprehensive, top-down, end-to-end security solution for WMANETs.