The FCC seeks to connect 19 million unserved Americans to broadband by 2020. These rural areas have yet to be fully connected to the Internet due to wireline infrastructure costs which exceed potential revenue opportunities. Even in heavily-populated environments with sufficient wireline infrastructure, capacity issues remain in congested stadiums, disaster recovery zones, and public transportation. Each aforementioned access challenge seemingly is well-suited for wireless mesh networks, but have yet to be fully solved. However, recently, there has been a sizable growth in radios operating in diverse frequency bands (e.g., TV white spaces) with emerging multi-antenna schemes. In this project, multi-user beamforming and diverse frequency bands are leveraged to significantly build upon the flexibility originally sought by mesh networks. In doing so, frequency-agile beamforming mesh (FabMesh) networks seek to truly scale in complexity and cost according to the user population and traffic demand. The work includes three key innovations: (i) client-side, beamforming-aware, and frequency-agile protocols to improve performance and reliability of clients, using contextual information and advanced physical layer techniques, (ii) analysis of spatial reuse and capacity for media access control in mesh networks which leverage multi-user beamforming, and (iii) scalable network deployments which leverage multi-user beamforming along the backhaul and adaptation across multiple frequency bands according to network demand. The project includes a number of hands-on courses for university students at all levels, "just in time" pedagogical approaches to thousands of online students, outreach to under-represented students and communities, and key industrial collaborations to accelerate the commercial adoption of FabMesh networks.
