Novel Wireless Mesh Networking Architectures for Future Smart Homes

Future smart homes will create comfortable living environments which are embedded with a wide range of intelligent functionalities including home computing, entertainment, health care, and security. These place stringent requirements on the home networking architecture. In this paper, we propose a novel concept of Virtual Wireless Wire (Viwiwire), which is a set of consecutive high bandwidth wireless links over which concurrent transmission and reception can operate without interference. Based on this concept, a number of specific mesh networking architectures are proposed for future smart home networking. These include: wireless busline mesh, wireless ring mesh, and general multi-path mesh. The paper presents analyses that demonstrate the high performance of the proposed networking architectures.