Wireless Mesh Networking: An IoT-Oriented Perspective Survey on Relevant Technologies

TLDR

The Internet of Things envisions billions of humans and machines interconnecting, making mesh‑topology networks attractive for their scalability and resilience to failures. This survey aims to identify which wireless technologies—IEEE 802.11, Bluetooth, IEEE 802.15.4, and LoRa—are suitable for mesh networking, either natively or through adaptation. We analyze how these standard and proprietary technologies can be tailored to heterogeneous IoT contexts such as smart cities and agriculture, and present reference use cases for each.

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT), being a “network of networks”, promises to allow billions of humans and machines to interact with each other. Owing to this rapid growth, the deployment of IoT-oriented networks based on mesh topologies is very attractive, thanks to their scalability and reliability (in the presence of failures). In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of the following relevant wireless technologies: IEEE 802.11, Bluetooth, IEEE 802.15.4-oriented, and Sub-GHz-based LoRa. Our goal is to highlight how various communication technologies may be suitable for mesh networking, either providing a native support or being adapted subsequently. Hence, we discuss how these wireless technologies, being either standard or proprietary, can adapt to IoT scenarios (e.g., smart cities and smart agriculture) in which the heterogeneity of the involved devices is a key feature. Finally, we provide reference use cases involving all the analyzed mesh-oriented technologies.