An architecture for community mesh networking

The advances on wireless mesh networks are shifting the communications paradigm, where users can benefit from their cooperation to exchange information and make use of the spectrum space, forming wireless neighbourhood communities where resources are shared and services are distributed. This paper presents a modular cross-layer community management architecture, which considers that communities are formed and managed at different layers, from physical to application. It focus in more depth on one of its modules, implementing a community discovery mechanism designed to work in wireless mesh networks, and able to perform community advertisement and discovery with low overhead and delay, as compared to current approaches.