QuRiNet

The Quail Ridge Wireless Mesh Network project is an effort to provide a wireless communications infrastructure to the wildlife reserve. The network will benefit on-site ecological research and provide a wireless mesh network testbed for development and analysis. This is a joint project with the University of California Natural Reserve System and the Networks Lab at the Department of Computer Science, UC Davis.

The goal is to create a large scale wireless mesh network backbone deployed within the reserve. Various sensor networks would gather temperature, visual, and acoustic data at certain locations. This information would then be passed back to the field station for storage or for further relay over Ethernet. The backbone nodes will also serve as access points enabling wireless access at their locations.

The Quail Ridge Reserve will also act as a test bed for research in wireless mesh networks. Some of our research goals include:

Layer 2 Routing: We would like to forward traffic at the MAC layer in order to avoid excess processing time and addressing required by current routing protocols. We are interested in finding ways to intelligently select paths for packets at the MAC layer.
Monitoring and Maintenance Tools: With access to the Quail Ridge Test Bed, we would like to design and develop wireless mesh network monitoring and maintenance tools that would be useful to future mesh network administrators and researchers.
Time Based Access Mechanisms Time division multiple access: Current 802.11 mesh networks must utilize CSMA/CA in order to access the channel. With a large number of users, it may be more efficient to organize access based on time. We are interested in applying TDMA schemes over 802.11 in order to boost performance.
Exploiting the Multiple Channel Advantage: The access points we have chosen for Quail Ridge are equipped with two radios. This will allow us to intelligently and dynamically select channels in order to avoid interference on high-traffic links.

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