Scalable Routing in a City-Scale Wi-Fi Network for Disaster Recovery

2025-04-08

AI Summary

This work addresses the scalability challenge of routing in city-scale Wi-Fi mesh networks under wide-area network outages following disasters. We propose MapMesh—the first geographically aware mesh architecture that deeply integrates high-precision open building maps (e.g., OpenStreetMap) into routing decisions. Methodologically, it combines precomputed path planning, a distributed geographic routing protocol, Wi-Fi-based multi-hop self-organizing networking, and coordinated forwarding between static access points and mobile devices to enable efficient routing over dynamically evolving topologies with up to one million nodes. Its key innovation lies in leveraging semantic building-structure information—such as walls and floors—to constrain radio propagation modeling and path selection, thereby overcoming the urban-scale scalability limitations of conventional MANET and mesh protocols. Simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate >90% message delivery ratio, end-to-end latency under 1 second, and routing overhead two orders of magnitude lower than AODV, OLSR, and GeoRouting.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Intelligent Robots: Localization, Mapping, and Navigation
• Search and Optimization: Sampling/Simulation-based Search

Application Category

• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Location- and context-aware Web and WoT applications and services
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements

Abstract

In this paper, we present a new city-scale decentralized mesh network system suited for disaster recovery and emergencies. When wide-area connectivity is unavailable or significantly degraded, our system, MapMesh, enables static access points and mobile devices equipped with Wi-Fi in a city to route packets via each other for intra-city connectivity and to/from any nodes that might have Internet access, e.g., via satellite. The chief contribution of our work is a new routing protocol that scales to millions of nodes, a significant improvement over prior work on wireless mesh and mobile ad hoc networks. Our approach uses detailed information about buildings from widely available maps--data that was unavailable at scale over a decade ago, but is widely available now--to compute paths in a scalable way.

Problem

• Develop scalable routing for city-wide Wi-Fi mesh networks
• Enable connectivity during disasters without internet infrastructure
• Utilize building map data to improve path computation efficiency

Innovation

• Decentralized mesh network for city-scale connectivity
• Scalable routing protocol for millions of nodes
• Uses building data from maps for path computation