P2 Mobile Technologies Limited

Wirelessing the world......with no limitation

Wireless Mesh Networking White Paper Series Back-N

A True 802.11n Wireless Mesh Network Backbone of a True End-to-End Bandwidth Up To 300Mbps

http://www.p2mt.com Address: Unit 310A, 3/F, Core Building 1, No. 1 Science Park East Avenue, Hong Kong Science Park, Shatin, N.T., Hong Kong Tel: (852) 39051880 Email: info@p2mt.com

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The Current State of *802.11n* Wireless Mesh Networks

Ever since the 802.11n standard has been published in October 2009, it has overwhelmingly changed the entire Wi-Fi industry due to, thanks to its adaption of MIMO technologies, an almost 6-fold increase in bandwidth compared with the then de facto standard 802.11g Wi-Fi technology (i.e., 300Mbps vs. 54Mbps). As a result, the 802.11n based routers have quickly stolen the spotlight and become the new de facto standard in virtually any Wi-Fi market. Users can now enjoy a significant boost in bandwidth that can go as high as 300Mbps. Majority of these Wi-Fi router vendors, however, have only implemented the access part, or the infrastructure mode, of the 802.11n standard. Technically speaking, to build a Wireless Mesh Network (WMN), the backbone part, or Ad Hoc mode, of the 802.11n standard is required. In other words, the players in the WMN industry must first implement the Ad Hoc mode of 802.11n, before they can roll out their fully 802.11n compliant WMN products to the market. The bad news is that, the Ad Hoc mode of any particular 802.11 version means extra R&D effort on top of its infrastructure mode counterpart. This normally causes significant delays for the vendors to introduce the WMN products supporting the latest and greatest 802.11 standard. For example, the 802.11n infrastructure mode products have long been in the market since the very first day of its publication in October 2009, while the *truly 802.11n* based WMN product is still not seen in the market yet. The catch of the term *truly 802.11n* in the last paragraph is worth more discussions here. Many WMN vendors like to claim that their products do support 802.11n. In reality, many of those claims are only valid at the access link of the WMN, but not valid at the backbone. In other words, these WMNs so built would appear to be 802.11n enabled, as the users devices would appear to be connected to an 802.11n Wi-Fi network because their 802.11n enabled device, such as notebook, smartphone, iPad, etc., has detected an 802.11n access link with bandwidth of 150Mbps or even up to 300Mbps. However, the WMN backbone that actually carries the data through the entire WMN is running with 802.11a/g standard which only has a bandwidth of up to 54Mbps. In other words, regardless the bandwidth seen by the user device, the actual bandwidth inside the WMN is bottlenecked by the backbones 54Mbps. Figure 1 illustrates this problem.

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2011. P2 Mobile Technologies Limited. All rights reserved.

Figure 1: Traditional *802.11n* WMN -- the bandwidth is bottlenecked at the backbone As a result, many WMN users complain that they do connect with 802.11n (because their devices show a bandwidth of 150Mbps or 300Mbps on the screen), yet they notice that the effective bandwidth is always limited to 54Mbps (i.e., 802.11a/gs bandwidth). The reason is simple their data is indeed carried by a backbone with bandwidth of up to only 54Mbps. Therefore, the effective bandwidth he/she actually perceives is only up to 54Mbps.

2011. P2 Mobile Technologies Limited. All rights reserved.

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The Back-N Technology

The research team in P2 Mobile Technologies led by Professor Peter Chong, Dr. Patrick Lam and Dr. Ivan Ho has invented the patent pending Back-N technology to eliminate the bottleneck depicted in Figure 1. The Back-N technology enables the truly end-to-end 802.11n WMN backbone with which the WMN users can now enjoy an end-to-end bandwidth up to full 300Mbps within the entire WMN. That is, many bandwidth demanding applications such as video surveillance and location tracking can now take the full advantage of 802.11ns high throughput as well as WMNs extreme flexibility. Figure 2 depicts how the Back-N technology running on our MeshRanger routers boosts the users WMN experience. The Back-N technology is important to the success of the market acceptance of WMN because the users perceived performance can now be significantly improved (close to 6-fold!). The Back-N technology, along with many other advanced features aimed to enhance the reliability, convenience and performance of WMN, is incorporated into all the products in the MeshRanger line.

Figure 2: Back-N -- A True End-to-End 802.11n Wireless Mesh Network

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2011. P2 Mobile Technologies Limited. All rights reserved.

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Conclusions

Together with P2 Mobile Technologies, we are wirelessing the world with no limitation. By incorporating the Back-N technology into our MeshRanger line of routers, our customers can finally enjoy the truly end-to-end 802.11n performance with the lowest-possible cost and the highest-possible convenience when deploying many network applications in which wiring is not feasible. Nowwhat else is your barrier?

2011. P2 Mobile Technologies Limited. All rights reserved.

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