Broadband Wireless Mesh Network
Broadband Wireless Mesh Network (B-WMN) connectivity has become one of the essential aspects of smart city infrastructure. Despite the abundance of fibre availability in urban environments, providing a wired infrastructure for any digital service is a costly endeavour that requires careful planning and often results in static inflexible structures. It causes significant civil life disruption and costs to deploy solutions rapidly and flexibly. B-WMNs aim to overcome these problems by minimising and/or eliminating the need for wired infrastructure, and utilising existing city infrastructures as platforms for their deployment (Egners et al., 2013). B-WMNs have low installation and maintenance costs and facilitate connection to every possible location in urban or rural environments regardless of the complexity of reach. There are several applications of B-WMNs such as digital home, broadband Internet access, building automation, health and medical systems, and emergency and disaster networking (Salah & Salleh, 2013). Public works officials can use B-WMNs to monitor their water and power supplies by installing a wireless mesh network in sewers, water treatment facilities, or generators. Public safety workers can use secure virtual networks to stay in touch. Mesh nodes can also be mounted on streetlights, stoplights, and other moving objects; which creates an opportunity for several devices to be connected to the mesh network in the case of an emergency (BasuMallick, 2022). B-WMN is an infrastructure that consists of a network of routers wirelessly communicating with each other at gigabit speeds (fibre-like). It consists of radio nodes which need not be cabled to a wired port like the conventional wireless access points (Parvin, 2019). B-WMNs have gained increasing attention as an attractive means to provide widespread connectivity in complement to the access offered by regular Internet Service Providers (ISPs). The mesh topology of B-WMNs provides high flexibility, up to 99.999% reliability and under 2ms of latency, ideal for real-time high bandwidth applications, thereby, leading to a physical infrastructure that allows for flexible routing and transport connections (Matos et al., 2011). B-WMN infrastructure in urban areas (Cilfone et al., 2019) Problems to be solved High cost of deployment GHG emissions from deployment and maintenance High energy demand Need for seamless and high-speed 5G connectivity Lack of access to dense urban areas