Wireless mesh networks can complement the fixed Internet network by extending wireless network coverage in campus networks or by connecting devices such as sensors or weather / climate monitoring stations deployed in remote areas without high bandwidth network access. Therefore, they are very interesting for different organizations of higher education and research.
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 auditing function may then trigger alarms or even perform self-healing of the network.