First International Workshop on "Wireless mesh: moving towards applications" (Co-located with QShine 2006, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada) August 10, 2006 Deadline Extended! www.wimeshnets.org Jointly sponsored by: Create-Net, EU (IST-FET) and ICST

Scope

Recent advances in wireless mesh networks (WMNs) provide promising opportunities in communication paradigms. WMNs do not depend on wired communication infrastructure and their mesh connectivity provides inherent built-in redundancy. This makes them also good candidates for providing an alternative communication mechanism in the face of disasters when normal communication infrastructure is destroyed. WMNs build upon multi-hop forwarding of data packets from access nodes towards gateways to the fixed network and thus share many properties of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks. So far almost all existing research effort related to Mobile Ad Hoc networks has been based mostly on the assumptions that the nodes are highly mobile and are mainly battery operated. Thus, most of the protocols and mechanisms try to conserve energy and cope with frequent topology changes. In WMNs these assumptions can be relaxed which enables the design of new protocols and services for WMNs. Supporting any application over wireless mesh networks is however a challenging task due to the multi-hop forwarding of packets which also limits the scalability of WMNs. Nevertheless, WMNs have promising commercial potential as they are supposed to provide cheap wireless network coverage and access. Towards this aim the traditional approaches to routing and to service provisioning should be reconsidered taking into account the intrinsic characteristics of WMNs and those of new and emerging applications. This could pave the way to the assessment of this technology which is expected to conquer new markets in the next few years by taking advantage of the growth of heterogeneous networks.

Important dates

Full paper manuscript due:	May 24, 2006 (CET)
Acceptance Notification:	June 25, 2006
Camera ready manuscripts due:	July 9, 2006
Workshop date:	August 10, 2006