Ubiquitous Mesh: A Wireless Mesh Network for IoT Systems in Smart Homes and Smart Cities

IoT (Internet of Things) is essential for Smart Homes. For a complete and fully fledged Smart Home (or Office), IoT has to be ubiquitous, and plausible in every corner of the enclosed region. For many homes, a single wireless access point is not adequate; a common solution is to either increase transmission power or to use range extenders. In this work, a Mesh-based alternative is proposed, which may lead way to significant reduction in transmission power that's generally used. Additionally, it eliminates the decrease in the connectivity (signal strength) in the remote corners of the home or office spaces. Walls rival signals and cause degradation in the quality of signal; this is strongly addressed in the proposed solution. All active and passive devices (which are comprised of all the smart connected devices in the household) in the network contribute by being a node in the mesh network; this allows for very high connectivity or routability. This provides with many alternatives for traffic flow, allowing better optimization for the same. A prototype consisting of active and passive nodes is developed to demonstrate the working of the system. Further, a basic discussion is presented on how MIMO technologies could be merged with Mesh technologies.