Architecture, Issues and Challenges of Wireless Mesh Network Syed Yasmeen Shahdad, Asfia Sabahath, Reshma Parveez Abstract—Wireless Mesh Network has the ability to provide broadband access dynamically to anyone anywhere in the world by setting up nodes in the network. It provides the wide scale connectivity with less cost than the wired network. In addition to the cost advantage, wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are easy to sustain, robust and provide reliable service coverage. Wireless mesh networks (WMN) are multi-hop networks with the capability of sending packets between wireless routers. In this paper the architecture, features and applications of distinct wireless mesh networks has been described. In addition, during communication in wireless mesh networks the purpose and performance of various layers has been described. Number of issues and challenges are raised in WMN because of its performance. In this paper, we have specified the challenges and issues in this emerging technology that have to be solved in order to have an efficient and reliable communication. Index Terms— Architecture, Applications, Challenges, Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) I. INTRODUCTION Providing broadband access to anyone anywhere in the world is a challenge to today’s networking market. Wired connections may not be the appropriate solution in terms of cost, setup, software and hardware beside the disadvantage of immobility of clients. The wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are introduced to provide the wide scale connectivity with lower cost than the wired network [1]. In addition to the cost advantage, wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are easy to maintain, robust and provide reliable service coverage [1]. Also, it can be deployed in difficult terrain where a wire line network is difficult to be deployed. The decreasing cost of the wireless interface cards has strongly pushed the development and spread of wireless mesh networks. A. Syed Yasmeen Shahdad completed M.Tech from Maharishi Dayanand University,India (e-mail:yasmeenshahdad@ gmail.com). S. B. Asfia Sabahath completed M.Sc Computer Science from Osmania University,India (e-mail:asfia.saba@ gmail.com). T. C. Reshma Parvez is with VTU,India (e-mail:reshma_parveez@ yahoo.com). Wireless mesh network (WMN) is a network which uses multiple hops to send packets between source and destination. WMNs are capable of maintaining mesh connectivity and have tendency of self-healing thus making network adaptable when nodes are deleted or added. Through gateways WMNs are imagined to be compatible with existing technologies such as wired and wireless networks. WMN’s comprises of Mesh routers and Mesh clients. A. MESH ROUTER The nodes are one of the essential components of WMN. Since mesh routers are considered as backbone of WMN and helps in transferring packets to and from clients using multi-hop technology in order to cover larger areas with less cost. B. MESH CLIENTS Mesh clients lack gateway bridge functionality but they can act as a router and they are considered as mobile or stationary/end user devices. For example laptop, desktop, smart phones etc. Outline: This paper is organized as follows. Section II discuss the WMN Architecture, section III briefs the applications, section IV describes the specifications, section V introduce the design factors of mesh technologies, challenges is provided in section VI. Finally, simulation results are presented in Section VII. II. WMN ARCHITECTURE Wireless Mesh Network architecture has been shown in fig. 1 .Communication is possible for the network which is linked to the internet through WMN. Nodes which provide Internet connectivity are called gateways. In this figure, mesh clients represent other networks such as cellular, IEEE 802.11, IEEE 802.15, and sensor networks. WMN architecture consists of gateways, mesh routers and the mesh clients [1, 3]. Different type of connections are used as shown in fig. 1.Among all connections one connection is intra-mesh and others are either wireless or wired. The selection of connection is based on tradeoff between the cost and performance of WMN. Fig. 1. Wireless Network Architecture 0557