The Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol (HWMP), part of

IEEE 802.11s IEEE 802.11s is a wireless local area network (WLAN) standard and an IEEE 802.11 amendment for Wireless mesh network, mesh networking, defining how wireless devices can interconnect to create a wireless LAN mesh network, which may be used for relati ...

, is a basic routing protocol for a

wireless mesh network A wireless mesh network (WMN) is a Telecommunications network, communications network made up of radio Node (networking), nodes organized in a Mesh networking, mesh Network topology, topology. It can also be a form of wireless ad hoc network.Chai ...

. It is based on

AODV Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) Routing is a routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and other wireless ad hoc networks. It was jointly developed in July 2003 in Nokia Research Center, University of California, Santa Barbara ...

(RFC 3561) and tree-based routing. It relies on a Peer Link Management protocol by which each Mesh Point discovers and tracks neighboring nodes. If any of these are connected to a wired backhaul, there is no need for HWMP, which selects paths from those assembled by compiling all mesh point peers into one composite map. The HWMP protocol is hybrid, because it consists of a proactive tree-based hierarchical routing protocol, and an on-demand logic, based on the Ad-hoc On Demand Vector protocol (AODV). In contradiction with classic IP based (ISO level 3) routing, the HWMP protocol is based on ISO level 2 (based on MAC addresses). HWMP is intended to displace proprietary protocols used by vendors like Meraki for the same purpose, permitting peer participation by open source router firmware. The open source implementation of 802.11s (open80211s) has been integrated to the

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU ...

by Cozybit Inc.

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...

supports HWMP starting with FreeBSD 8.0.

References

IEEE 802.11 Network protocols {{Compu-network-stub