Improved mesh networks can enable outdoor monitoring and surveillance applications. A⁴-Mesh will develop a completely functional wireless mesh infrastructure including support for authentication and authorization, accounting, and auditing.

(see also project exension eA4-Mesh)

Goals

To successfully use wireless mesh networks in the area of Swiss higher education, wireless mesh networks have to support authentication, authorization, accounting, and auditing. They must also be seamlessly integrated into the organizations' authentication and authorization infrastructure. As there are usually multiple concurrent users of the network, the wireless mesh network has to support accounting to enable billing the costs to the different users and to support network management. For a successful operation of a wireless mesh network, inconsistent and erroneous states in the networks have to be detected and resolved. This requires constant auditing of network state and configuration.
The project will achieve the following specific goals:

1. Authentication and authorization: Network nodes, clients (end systems), network users and administrators are authenticated (and authorized).
2. Accounting: Network characteristics and traffic is monitored; individual charging, short-term accounting on the nodes and long-term aggregation on a central server are possible.
3. Auditing: Inconsistent or erroneous node states are automatically detected and states recovered.
4. Test beds, pilot networks and user trials: Indoor test beds for iterative testing, outdoor pilot networks for evaluation under realisitic scenarios and connection of small remote sites with cost-efficient backup links are deployed.
5. Demonstration ans Dissemination: A⁴-Mesh is demonstrated to the public using the pilot networks (environmental research and campus network extension show-cases).

Benefits

The project will allow to increase the coverage of campus networks and networks for environmental monitoring applications.
With the approaches developed in A⁴-Mesh the organizations of Swiss higher education can easily extend the coverage of their campus networks, e.g., when sites of a University are several 100 m or kms away from the main campus.
They can also connect remote sites for research projects or events.
Many research projects in different research areas (climate research, geology and biology) may profit from an easily deployable outdoor wireless network that supports high speed network access as well as authentication and authorization based on SWITCHaai and mechanisms for accounting and auditing.
A⁴-Mesh also supports the concurrent use of the wireless network infrastructure by multiple projects with the ability of a detailed accounting and billing.
The project reduces the network maintenance costs by auditing functions that may trigger recovery mechanisms of the network.

Development

First the system architecture has to be defined. Then the following parts will be designed and implemented:

• authentication mechanisms for network nodes and end systems
• authorization functions, software package including user documentation
• short term accounting mechanisms and integration of short term accounting data to diversity network setup
• long-term accounting incl. charging, software package for accounting including user documentation
• network monitoring and auditing functions
• self-healing mechanisms
• alarming infrastructure
• software package for network monitoring and auditing functions
• definition of indoor test beds and pilot network (environmental research show case)
• setup of indoor test beds
• agreements with land owners for environmental research pilot network
• test setup of environmental research pilot network
• initial setup of environmental research pilot network, pilot network for campus network extension and pilot network for redundant connectivity of small remote sites
• demonstration events ("A⁴-Mesh Info-Day" is planned in November 2011)
• evaluation