Abstract
The wireless mesh network and the associated IEEE 802.11s standard have attracted an enormous amount of research in the wireless research community in the past few years. Nevertheless, WMN architecture has not received much needed attention compared to other topics in this area of research. Based on topological differences, various network architectures are possible for WMNs, and we believe such architectures could affect wireless characteristics differently. In this article we provide an overview of architectural design approaches for WMNs, then summarize the state-of-the-art research findings and suggest further topics that need to be addressed. Additionally, we identify three different types of architectures for WMNs: campus mesh, downtown mesh, and long-haul mesh. Furthermore, we discuss and investigate different WMN characteristics that could be affected by commonly deployed architectures. Among the considered characteristics we select routing, network management, and network performance for further analysis, and look at the challenges these architectures face with respect to those characteristics. To illustrate these challenges, we perform a simple experiment to show that LHM and DTM under identical network environments show significant differences in performance parameters such as throughput and delay.