Abstract: Compared to traditional mobile ad hoc networks, wireless sensor networks and infrastructure-based mobile cellular networks,wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are: (a) quasi-static in network topology and architecture, (b) not resource constrained at the mesh routers and (c) are easy and flexible to deploy. These technological advantages are especially appealing to the emerging market requirements on future wireless networks and services. WMNs combine wired and wireless networks with wireless routers as backbones and mobile stations as users. Wireless routers communicate with each other, and conduct multihop communications to forward mobile wireless stations' traffic to/from wired networks.
Mobile users' traffic travels over wireless routers and reaches wired networks. Each mobile station also acts as a router, forwarding packets for other mobile stations. As mobility and energy- saving are no longer issues, WMN routing considers link quality metrics suh as capacity or error probability. Potential applications of WMNs include broadband home networking, community and neighbourhood networking, enterprise networking, building automation, health and medical systems, public safety and security systems,intelligent transportation systems, emergency/disaster networking, metropolitan area broadband Internet access. This wide range of applications have different technical requirements and challenges in the design and deployment of mesh networking architectures, algorithms and protocols.Quality of service (QoS) is a challenging issue in WMNs which promise to support a variety of traffic types. They should satisfy, for example, the requirements of video streaming , Web surfing, bursty traffic over the Internet. In addition, they may need to deal with all different types of traffic simultaneously. As a consequence, various QoS classes are defined according to different traffic types. Users have strong preference for wireless access, and hence the increase in wireless access capacity could drive a wave of innovation that increases the total demand and high speed wreless access proliferates.
This presentation is organized as follows. Starting from the fact that the wireless mesh networking is an emerging technology for future broadband wireless access, WMNs overview is reported, together with streaming over mesh networks. Future wireless networking can benefit from a robust and reliable wireless mesh backbone rendered by mesh routers providing an all wireless ambiance. From this point of view, second part of this work deals with routing in WMNs including metrics as well as cross-layer design. As wireless mesh networking is an important architecture for future generation wireless communication systems, QoS provisioning as a challenging issue is considered in the third part. Open research issues and future work conclude the presentation.

Brief Biography of the Speaker:
Prof.dr Zoran Bojkovic (http://www.zoranbojkovic.com) is a full professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Belgrade,Serbia and a permanent visiting professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, TX, USA, EE Department, Multimedia System Lab. He was a visiting professor in more than 20 Universities worldwide and has taught a number of courses in Electrical Technology, Telecommunication Systems and Networks, Speach, Image and Video Processing, Multimedia Wire/Wireless Communication Systems, Computer Networks. Prof. Bojkovic is the co-author of 6 international books/monographies ( Publishers: Prentice-Hall, Wiley, CRC Press, WSEAS ) Also, some of these books have been published and translated in Canada, China, Singapore and India. He is co-editor in 62 International Books and Conference Proceedings. He has published more than 420 papers in peer-reviewed journals, conference proceedings and publications.He has conducted keynote/plenary lectures, workshops/tutorials as well as seminars , and participated in more than 70 scientific and industrial projects all over the world.He has been a consultant to industry research institutes and academia. His activities included serving as Editor- in- Chief in 2 International Journals and as Associate Editor in 3 International Journals. Prof. Zoran Bojkovic is an active researcher in wire/wireless multimedia communications. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and WSEAS, member of EURASIP, full member of Engineering Academy of Serbia as well as a member of Serbian Scientific Society.