***********FebOct 20076 Newsletter:
from Archan Misra, Chair TCCC***********
Dear TCCC colleagues,
Greetings
and best wishes for a happy 2007! I had planned to send this newsletter out in
mid-January, but I unexpectedly
found time to
take a much-needed vacation, which I grabbed gleefullyI! This is the first newsletter
for 2007, a year which promises to be an exciting and eventful one for the TCCC
and its membership.
You will be pleased to note that your ExCom continues to plan and execute on many of our
ongoing ideas and projects, with several initiatives set to bear fruit in the
next month or so.
Rather
than wait for these initiatives to be underway, I thought I should send out
this newsletter with the following events and updates hope this
edition of the newsletter finds all of you in high spirits and good health! The
TCCC executive committee has been busy the last few months with various
organizational matters and I believe we’ve been making good progress towards
our underlying goals. This newsletter contains the
following items and updates:
·
Initiation of
convergence-related activities. Introduction of
recently-inducted TCCC ExCom members
·
·
Up-to-date call for
participation/papers atfor
TCCC sponsored conferences
·
Report on the
organization and conduct of LCN WoWMoM 20076
·
Overview of an upcoming TCCC ExCoM project.A news article by Prof.
Young-bae Ko, explaining ongoing IEEE activities in the hot area of “wireless
meshes” (arranged by the efforts of Sunghyun Choi, the Untethered Technologies
chair). Sunghyun, thank you for your efforts!
As always, please feel free to browse the newsletter
(also available from our Website: http://tab.computer.org/tccc/)
and let us know your opinions and feedback. We shall also be adding a
few new features to our Website in the next couple of months, which I hope will
increase its interactive nature and foster a greater sense of community. I’ll
heave more to say on those issues in the next newsletter.
Sincerely,
Archan Misra
TCCC Chair
archan@us.ibm.com
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INITIATION OF CONVERGENCE-RELATED ACTIVITIESNTRODUCTION
OF INITIAL ExCoM MEMBERS
After
a period of planning and preparation,
our Convergence
Chair, Sanjiv Rai
is now poised to spearhead some activities and initiatives related to the exciting area of Convergence. For
those of you unfamiliar with the term, Convergence refers to the ongoing research
and standardization activities to define a uniform control and signaling layer
for both wired and wireless networks, its range extending from efforts at the radio layer
on MAC-layer interoperability and spectral sharing to deployment of a common
IMS-based services and access control infrastructure for provider networks.
As
the first step in this initiative, Sanjiv will be circulating (to be sent out to all
members on the TCCC mailing list) a “Convergence Questionnaire”, seeking
feedback from our membership on the range of your interests and the types of
activities and information you would value the most.
Please take a few minutes to respond to this questionnaire, since that will
help us determine the future direction of our efforts. This questionnaire will go
out via the mailing list within a week. In addition to this Questionnaire, Sanjiv and our Member-at-Large,
Prof. Uday Desai
are holding the
first-ever
“Wireless Convergence
and Seamless Communications”
workshop (as part of the IEEE WoWMoM 2007 conference) in Helsinki, Finland on June 17. Further details on its organization, scope and associated deadlines are available at: http://www.ee.iitb.ac.in/wcsc/index.htm
Once the results from the
questionnaire are examined, Sanjiv and his team plan to start
a periodical Convergence newsletter, that shall highlight all relevant
convergence activities and recent events.
I am
pleased to inform you of the continuing expansion of our Executive Committee.
As you may recall, one of my stated priorities was to expand the diversity of
the ExCom, with an attempt to providing breadth in both geographical reach and
expertise. With this in mind, I’ve
pleased to report on the addition of several well-known and eminent
professional colleagues the ExCom.
Prof Joerg
Ott (from Helsinki University
of Technology, Finland) shall serve as the
“Multimedia Network Technologies” Chair—Prof Ott is an expert on various
multimedia signaling technologies (such as SIP), as well as on the emerging
area of delay-tolerant networks. Moreover, Prof. Ott is also active in the IETF
and shall provide us with a better view of standardization activities and
industry interests.
Dr. Frank
Huebner (from
AT&T Labs, USA) has agreed to serve as the “Finance Chair”—in this
capacity, he will coordinate the financial planning of our activities and be
responsible for the many facets of bookkeeping that require significant
diligence and time. Being aware of Frank’s management and negotiations skills
(displayed in the organization of the LCN conference), I am sure he will be a
great asset to us.
Prof. U.
B. Desai (from IIT
Bombay, IIT) joins us as a “Member-at-Large”—he is a stalwart in the wireless
community and widely respected across India, Europe and the US for his
activities related to Bluetooth, and more recently, 802.16. His guidance and
leadership should greatly help expand our activities within the vibrant
technical community in India and Asia. Finally,
Mr. Iqbal
Mohomed (from
University of Toronto, Canada) shall serve as our Webmaster—I shall look to him
to provide the boost needed to introduce various forms of interactivity to our
Web presence. I thank all of them for their volunteerism.
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INFORMATION AND POINTERS on UPCOMING and NEW CONFERENCE DEADLINESS
As always, this newsletter
reminds you of upcoming deadlines and im portant dates associated with We
encourage you to participate in the TTCCC-sponsored following conferences. Please note the important
dates below and plan to participate in our activities. that have some deadlines/dates of current relevance.
1.
Call for Papers: 32nd IEEE Conference on Local Computer
Networks (LCN), 2007, October 15-18, 2007, Dublin, Ireland.
The paper deadline for the main conference is
***April 2, 2007**. In addition, LCN 2007 will includes several other workshops, whose details will be
available from the Web page above.
2. Call for Participation: 5th IEEE
International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PERCOM) 2007, March 19-23, 2007,White Plains, USA.
http://www.cse.psu.edu/~hurson/percom2007/
Besides the main
conference, PERCOM
2007 includes 10 workshops, a special demo
session and several panels and keynote speeches. Early registration deadline
is ***February 15, 2007***.
3.
Call for Participation: 26th IEEE International Performance, Computing and
Communications Conference, (IPCCC) 2007, April 11-13, 2007, New Orleans, USA.
Besides the main
conference, IPCCC 2007 includes 4 workshops.
14. Call for
Papers in Workshops and Industry Session:
8th th IEEE
International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks (WoWMoM)
2007, June 18-21,2006, Helsinki, Finland.
http://ieee-wowmom.tml.hut.fi/
Deadline for (conference) Workshops and Industry
Sessions are all in the next few days.paper
submission: November 19, 2006.
2. Call for
Participation: 14th IEEE
International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP)
2006, November 12-15, 2006, Santa Barbara, USA.
http://www.ieee-icnp.org/2006/
Besides the main conference, ICNP 2006
includes the 2nd Workshop on Secure Network
Protocols (NPSEC).
3. Call for
Participation: 31st IEEE
Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN), 2006, November
14-17, 2006, Tampa, USA.
LCN 2006 includes
five additional workshops, on topics including sensor networks, measurements,
mobile and wireless computing and network security.
New Sponsorship: As part of our promised
effort to extend the TCCC’s support for new activities, I’m also happy to
announce the extension of TCCC sponsorship to a new conference on Wireless and
Mobile Computing, Networking and Communications (WiMob) from
2007. The preliminary details of the WiMob conference are available at http://www.gel.usherbrooke.ca/WiMob2007/. (More
details will follow in due course of time.)
CONFERENCE REPORT: IEEE LCNE WoWMoM 2006
Joe
Bumblis, BAE SystemsArchan Misra, IBM Research
Introduction
The
31st International Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN: http://www.ieeelcn.org) was held from
November 14 through November 16, 2006 at the Embassy Suites in Tampa, Florida.
The Embassy Suites complex is located on the campus of the University of South
Florida (USF: http://www.usf.edu/index.asp);
USF is a financial supporter of the LCN conference.
The Conference
The
31st LCN conference was comprised of three primary blocks: 1. Workshops; 2. Keynote Addresses; and 3.
Conference papers. On Tuesday, November 14, 2006 the 31st LCN
conference started with a full day of workshops; the Workshop block consisted
of five workshops:
a)
First IEEE LCN
Workshop on Network Measurements (Half-day workshop), b) Second IEEE LCN Workshop on
Network Security (Half-day workshop), c) First IEEE International Workshop on Practical
Issues in Building Sensor Network Applications (SenseApp 2006: Full-day
workshop), d) Second IEEE International
Workshop on Performance and Management of Wireless and Mobile Networks (Full-day
workshop) and e) Sixth International Workshop
on Wireless Local Networks (WLN: Full-day workshop).
This
author attended the "Second IEEE International Workshop on Performance and
Management of Wireless and Mobile Networks." In Recent years, wireless and
mobile communication systems have become increasingly popular as an inexpensive
and promising means for ubiquitous communications. However, the performance and
resource management of wireless and mobile communication systems are becoming a
very crucial phase for future generation of wireless and mobile networks. This
workshop focused on the design, performance and resource management of wireless
and mobile networks. Of particular interest was a paper by Li, Claypool, and
Kinicki titled "Packet Dispersion in IEEE 802.11 Wireless Networks".
Here the authors discussed the issues of 802.11 packet dispersion and the
impact such dispersion may have on applications like streaming video and highly
meshed networks. Another paper of particular interest was written by Khabiri
and Bettayed titled "Efficient Algorithms for Secure Multicast Key
Management". Here the authors present some simulated evidence of
security-key loss in wireless secure transaction models. The workshop ended
with several short paper presentations (poster session) covering such topics as
mesh network routing delays, TV offerings over 3G cellular systems, and dynamic
spectrum management.
On
Wednesday, 15 November 2006 the first of two keynote addresses took place. This
first keynote was offered by Dr. Bob Ianucci, Senior Vice President and Head of
the Nokia Research Center. Dr. Ianucci's talk was titled: "In Search of
the Next Big Thing". During his talk Dr. Ianucci addressed the ongoing
revolution in the mobile communications domain, and the urgent signals of
change visible within the technology and business environment. He also
discussed several ways in which industry, academia, and standardization can
adapt to perceive and respond to this rapidly changing and unpredictable
environment. Dr. Ianucci discussed how the modern day cell phone has migrated
from a "terminal" device to a gateway. The largest challenge has been
to keep the internal power dissipation to three watts or less; more than three
watts and the cell phone becomes to warm to hold. Moreover, today's cell phone
typically has eight radios and 11 antennas; the antennas consume about 20% of
the physical space in the phone.
Today's cell phone executes about three billion micro-instructions per
second which allows the cell phone to act more like a gateway to other
networked services, offering a very human-centric interface, allowing for an
applications development platform, support of virtual/information spaces like
WWW and database access, and currently offering limited sensing capabilities of
the physical world (including human sensors) through a Bluetooth interface to
sensor networks. In addition to the interfaces described above, Nokia continues
to support standards like MIPI, Liberty Alliance, W3C, Wi-Fi Alliance, and the
Trusted Computing Group to name a few. Dr. Ianucci completed his talk by
expressing what he believes will be the "next big things". He
believes the technology Nokia needs to watch includes: 1. Software radio technology; 2.
Carbon nano-tube technology as possible filters between A/D converters and the
cell phone antenna(s); 3.
Environmental metadata for sensing applications; 4. Dynamic 3-D VI technologies with graphics accelerators; and 5. Emerging printed circuit board (PCB)
technologies capable of creating a PCB from a printer. Additional detail can be
viewed at: http://research.nokia.com
After
the keynote address, the paper sessions commenced. The paper sessions were
divided into three tracks. This author attended several tracks on a variety of
topics including "Performance Evaluation" and "P2P and Overlay
Networks". This author observed many outstanding papers in the paper
tracks attended. However report length restrictions prevent a detailed review
of any individual paper in this conference report.
On
Thursday, November 16, 2006 the second conference keynote address commenced.
Dr. Edward Knightly, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice
University in Houston, Texas presented his talk titled "Large-Scale Urban
Mesh Networks: from Deployment to Applications". The focus of this talk
centered around the activity of many cities which are embarking on ambitious
plans to cover large geographical areas with high-performance wireless access
networks employing a mesh architecture. With the "digital divide"
ever growing, the application of pervasive wireless mesh networks and
transformational applications may indeed bring poor communities a step closer
to the elimination of poverty. Such an experiment was set up in southeast
Houston community. Dr. Knightly described how Rice University established an
"access tier" comprised of an IEEE 802.11b mesh network, a
"backbone tier" comprising several wireless hops to a gateway, and an
"alternate route" tier comprised of a fiber optic network in this
Houston community. Each home in the coverage area was equipped with a 10m high
antenna and appropriate 200mW wireless hardware. Dr. Knightly explained that
network optimization was achieved through a combination of node spacing, path
length to the gateway, geometry of the nodes (i.e. clustering), randomness of
the node placements, and link VS. network-wide behavior parameters. It was
observed that the number of hops between the gateway and the farthest node was
three. Dr. Knightly went on to explain that a major problem was the starvation
issue in clustered wireless networks. In essence a node (or set of nodes) will
be starved of data because of their distance from the gateway node (power
issues) and because other closer nodes will "see" a clear channel
before the nodes farther away from the gateway (timing issue). Dr. Knightly
concluded his talk by briefly discussing the activities of the IEEE 802.11s
standards group. His primary concern with the 802.11s committee work is the
lack of support to change the 802.11 MAC to address the starvation problem.
Additional information regarding Dr. Knightly's work can be located at: http://networks.rice.edu .
The
remainder of the paper presentations followed Dr. Knightly's Keynote Address.
Of particular interest to this author was the paper track on "Modeling and
Advanced Techniques". A paper by Zhou, Pung, Ngoh, and Gu titled
"Ontology Modeling of a Dynamic Protocol Stack". The authors took a
holistic approach to the QoS issue of "knowledge" (predominantly the
QoS of the Knowledge Base) used in network infrastructures. Of concern to these
authors was a lack of end-to-end QoS simulation and real measurements to
validate the model. The authors' research was limited to the Resource
Description Framework Schema (RDFS) language for representation of information
predominantly on the web (see: http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-mt/
for details).
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The 7th International Symposium n a World of
Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks (WoWMoM 2006) was held from June
26-29, 2006 at the lovely border town of Niagara Falls, USA.
From the approx 140 papers submitted, the technical program consisted of 15
technical sessions, consisting of 15 extended papers, 32 regular papers and 11
poster presentations. Two of the more
prominent themes emerging from the conference technical track were a) the
importance of multimedia traffic management (including rate control and
cross-layer optimizations) for a variety of wireless applications and b) the
heightened importance of security (included intrusion detection, location
hiding etc.) for sensor-network based applications. Interestingly enough, the
support of a combination of interactive and broadcast multimedia traffic seems
to be the main technical challenge for emerging cellular and mesh network
architectures—several papers highlighted the enhancements that would need to be
at the MAC and routing layers. There was also significant audience interest in
several well-known problems related to sensor networks, with a noticeable trend
towards research in various “middleware” aspects of sensor networks (besides
the traditional focus on MAC and routing layer issues).
Some of
the interesting papers at the conference included “Entrapping Adversaries for
Source Protection in Sensor Networks” by Y. Ouyang. et al (which describes a
technique for inserting low-latency loops in the data delivery path to shield
the location of a source sensor from an eavesdropping adversary), “Mobile
Element Based Differentiated Message Delivery in Wireless Sensor Networks” by
Y. Gu, D. Bozdag and E. Ekici (which describes how the travel schedule of
mobile elements or data mules can be orchestrated to address differential QoS
tolerances in the generated data), “Some Insights from Bounds on UWB Sensor
Localization” by S. Venkatesh and M. Buehrer (which relates the accuracy of localization
to enhancements at the MAC layer to permit high throughput of packets
containing range estimates) and “An Energy-Efficient Forwarding Scheme for
Wireless Sensor Networks” by M. Busse, T. Haensselman and W. Effelsberg (which
shows how a new multi-link data forwarding approach, where a single
transmission reaches multiple receivers, can improve the energy efficiency and
lifetime of sensor networks).
The conference program
included two, extremely well-received, keynote speeches. The first keynote speech
titled “Multimedia Content on Mobile Devices: Opportunities and Challenges” by
Dr. Kumar Ramaswamy (VP, Corporate Research,Thomson) focused on the challenges
and issues related to multimedia delivery by cellular providers in a converged
network provider. Dr. Ramaswamy highlighted the importance of the increasingly
popularity on broadcast multimedia interactions (e.g., mobile TV via
technologies such as DVB), and argued that interactive multimedia traffic would
emerge as a value-added service over the basic broadcast traffic, presenting
several challenges for integrated signaling, service creation and service
management. The second keynote speech titled “Networking in a Heterogeneous,
Intermittent World” by Dr. Kevin Fall (Principal Engineer, Intel Research)
presented a fascinating overview of the emergence of delay, mobility and
disconnection tolerant applications as a new paradigm of communication in a
variety of scenarios. His talk highlighted how DTN scenarios resulted in new
research challenges in both protocol modification and application design, and
also presented newly emerging research on the applicability of DTN techniques
to underwater marine networks. In
addition, WoWMoM 2006 also featured a very lively panel discussion on “Integrated Optical and Wireless Technologies for
Broadband Access and Metro Networks”, which highlighted how advances in
broadband amplifiers and other technologies could lead to tighter integration
between a fiber-wired backbone and a wireless-based metro access network.
WoWMoM 2006 was collocated
with a set of five very successful workshops, including themes related to
“autonomic communications” “experimental evaluation of wireless networks”,
“distributed computing techniques in mobile applications”, “middleware components
for sensor networks” and “trust and privacy in pervasive environments”. Each of
these workshops attracted a focused and lively audience and generated
significant discussion and debate on emerging research trends in specific niche
areas.
Next year,
the 8th edition of IEEE WoWMoM will
be held in Helsinki, Finland on June18-21,
2007. Look forward to everyone’s participation in this
conference!
UPCOMING TCCC “COMMUNITY WEB”
PROJECT
Finally, I’d like to say a
few words about a
community-based, Web-oriented initiative that we plan to introduce shortly. The
TCCC ExCom has been debating on better ways to build more collaborative
interaction within our community. We believe that one of the ways to foster such a sense of
community will be through
the development of a “Community Web page” where various research and technical
projects being pursued globally by our members can be categorized and organized for easy access.
Such categorization provides two important benefits: a) it allows our members
to visit a single
TCCC-maintained Web site to obtain easy digestible views of global activities in areas of interest to them
and b) allows members from all geographies to describe and advertise their ongoing
work. Taken together, these two benefits should hopefully allow our far-flung
members to discover and establish collaborative relationships, as appropriate—with communication
and technological research becoming increasingly inter-disciplinary, we are
convinced that such collaboration opportunities will be critical for future
personal and collective success.
To maintain some degree of control over the quality of
the information, this “Community Projects” Web forum will be maintained by
several TCCC ExCom-controlled volunteers. TCCC members will be free to submit
descriptions of their projects/interest via Web-based forms for processing by
our staff, who will then categorize and post this information on the Web page. We plan to provide only concise “executive
summaries” of projects, as the goal is to facilitate “information
discovery”—our hope is that the summary will contain pointers to more detailed
Web pages at member institutions, and perhaps contact information, so that our readers can obtain more detailed
information, if desired. Clearly, the success or failure of this initiative will depend entirely
on how proactive and sincere all of you are in making this content
available—this is a purely voluntary effort (we will not be trolling the Web to
generate our own interpretation of other people’s projects!). Achieving a basic “critical
mass” of project
descriptions within
a moderate time period is essential to ensure value to all concerned—both the
producers and consumers of information. At present, we are testing out alpha
versions of these pages, and obtaining internal feedback based on custom content—as soon as we are finished
with our prototype, we shall make this resource available for participation by
all our members. Please stay tuned for more
information on this initiative!
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Multi-hop Relay/Mesh Technology in IEEE 802 standards
Young-Bae
Ko, Ajou University, Rep. of Korea
(This article was written by
Prof. Ko, Asst. Professor in the School of
Information and Computer Engineering at Ajou University. Prof. Ko’s
areas of interests include wireless networking protocols, radio technologies
and ubiquitous computing. He is an expert on wireless networking protocols and
was the recipient of the Best Student Paper Award in Mobicom 1998).
Wireless communications such as
Wi-Fi and broadband wireless
access (BWA) are gaining widespread
popularity for constructing the local and wide area
networks. The virtue of wireless medium has simplified the tedious or sometimes
even impossible task of running cables, thus also
reducing the cost and complexity of installation. However, the key question of
whether the current wireless technologies can effectively replace their wired
counterparts still remains at large, with the reason
being the dependency on the wired infrastructure and some inherent limitations
imposed by single-hop wireless communication
architecture. For example, the legacy IEEE 802.11 WLAN still
requires wire-line infrastructure, making
the technology expensive and time consuming to deploy. Also, its network performance
degrades sharply with the increasing number of users, failing to comply with
the economy of scale.
Hence as a better
alternative, a multi-hop relay/mesh technology is proposed, with the
advantages of higher
data-rate, capacity enhancement and ease of deployment, and so
on. In this context, the IEEE-SA (standard
association) has established several task groups for adopting wireless multi-hop relay/mesh
techniques, among which are the IEEE 802.16a, IEEE
802.16j, IEEE 802.11s, IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.15.5 covering from wide to
small area networks. Here, we mainly
focus on the two task groups, IEEE 802.16 and IEEE 802.11, and briefly
describe their aims, scopes and the current
status. The figure below shows the medium access control
(MAC) and the physical layer (PHY) of the related projects.
WMAN Relay/Mesh - IEEE 802.16a & j
The legacy
IEEE 802.16 standard provides the specification for the fixed broadband
wireless access (FBWA). With bandwidth of up to 75
Mbps, it uses both
licensed and unlicensed frequency bands
between 2 and 66 GHz. The IEEE 802.16 WG has set up IEEE 802.16a and IEEE
802.16j TGs, in order to apply the
concept of multi-hop wireless communication
for both fixed and portable/mobile BWA in
metropolitan areas.
First, the IEEE 802.16a standard
incorporates two different modes of communication,
namely, a point-to-multipoint (PMP) and the mesh mode. PMP mode strictly
requires all SS to connect to the base station (BS), whereas Mesh mode
enables the mesh architecture such that the neighboring SSs can directly communicate
with each other. For multi-hop mesh creation, each SS acts as a
router and forwards traffic from one to
another, until it arrives at the mesh-BS. It operates at the
2-11GHz frequency band that allows non-line-of-sight (NLOS)
communication in both licensed and license-free
spectrum. Internal routing between SSs is also
allowed if it is not required to send traffic to the BS but to some destination
SS in the same mesh. A mesh-BS connects the mesh network to backhaul link and
other external networks. For data transmission, it requires a single path
selection protocol between the nodes. However, the mesh mode in IEEE
802.16a is not backward compatible with the already existing PMP mode, and hence fails to
extend the capacity and the coverage provided by the existing setup.
The IEEE 802.16j, which is currently being
developed, aims to enhance PMP architecture by involving
relay station (RS) between the BS and the SSs, thereby introducing the multi-hop
communication. The project shall amend
and specify new methods that shall increase capacity, extensibility and the
scalability of the existing legacy setup. The scope of this project includes
the specification of the base station (named MMR-BS) and the relay stations, but shall
refrain from any modifications to SSs. Since the creating of TG on March 2006,
the IEEE 802.16 TGj is now under the process of preparing the baseline
documents for creating the standard. The specification is expected to be adopted
as a part of the working group standard by
the end of 2007.
WLAN Mesh - IEEE 802.11s
The IEEE
802.11 family of standards is currently the most successful wireless networking
standards that defines PHY and MAC sublayer for WLAN
devices. The working group continues to advance with various amendments, e.g., 802.11e
for QoS and 802.11n for higher data rates. However
these standards are still lack of wireless
distribution system (WDS) specification and include some
possible drawbacks of
throughput degradation and unfairness when applied to multihop networks.
The IEEE
802.11s ESS mesh aims at applying multihop
mesh techniques to specify a wireless distribution system (WDS) to build a
wireless infrastructure for the small to large scale WLANs. The ESS Mesh can be
considered an IEEE 802.11-based WDS, a subset of the distribution system (DS)
interconnecting the access points (APs), such
that the end-user stations can exploit the efficient mesh backhaul for sending
and receiving the data traffic. The activities of 802.11s TG consists of
specifying a new protocol suite for the installation, configuration and
operation of WLAN Mesh. Its implementation
shall be atop existing PHY layer of IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n that operates in the
unlicensed spectrum of 2.4 and 5 GHz frequency bands. The
specification shall include the
extensions in topology formation to make the WLAN Mesh
self-configure as soon as the devices are powered up. A path selection protocol
shall be specified in the MAC layer instead of network layer for routing data
in the multi-hop mesh topology. This standard is expected to support MAC-layer
broadcast/multicast in addition to the unicast transmissions. The standard
shall also accommodate devices that are able to support multi-channel
operations, or are equipped with multiple radios, with an aim to boost the
capacity of the overall network. The specification is expected to be adopted as
a part of the working group standard by
March 2008.