Design And Implementation Of Wireless Mesh AP Based On ARM Embedded Platform

Wireless Mesh Networks(WMNs) is also called"Muti-hop"Networks. It's a new wireless network technology which is absolutely different from the traditional wireless network.WMNs combines the advantages of WLAN networks and Ad-hoc networks. Compared with Non-Mesh networks, WMNs has a lot of advantages such as high performance price ratio, fast deployment, good extention. It has a huge wide range of scenarios such as in wireless campus networks, wireless cities, tourist locations, emergency communication, video minitor.As one of the important components of WMNs, it's no doubt that Wireless Mesh AP plays an important role in the whole WMNs. ARM embedded Linux is used for the implementation platform. So first of all, the Linux OS platform was bulit on the ARM embdeded board. And then, after analysing Ad-hoc routing protocol, this paper implemented the AODV routing protocol based on characteristics of the WMNs. Finally the AODV's ported on the embedded board. With the support and function of Host AP, the key function of Mesh AP is realized. In order to provide more security access services and functions, this paper implements SSID hiding, MAC filtering, WPA2 encryption and SNMP management.At last of this paper, a small WMNs is bulit in the laboratory based on the designed Mesh AP, to test the performance of the whole networks. Experiment results show that the AODV routing protocol modified can satisfy the basic requirements of the WMNs and the entire networks performs well.