Tropos Networks has announced a new family of Tropos MetroMesh routers, which it says are the the first in the industry to provide smart routing for multi-band metro-scale wireless mesh networks. According to company material, the new product family extends the benefits of the Tropos MetroMesh architecture, including the Predictive Wireless Routing Protocol (PWRP), Adaptive Mesh Connectivity Engine (AMCE) and Tropos Insight, to a wide variety of radio technologies.
The first member of this new product family is the Tropos 5320 outdoor MetroMesh router, a dual-band Wi-Fi mesh router. Other products in the MetroMesh router family will include multi-radio routers combining a variety of wireless technologies including MIMO, WiMAX, 4.9 GHz, 3G/4G cellular and more. Tropos Networks also announced the Tropos Metro Wireless Development (TMWD) program, which enables carriers, service providers, spectrum license holders and others to add custom radio interfaces to Tropos MetroMesh routers.
The Tropos 5320, which sports best-of-breed 802.11a and 802.11b/g radios, is the first and only mesh router that can dynamically create multi-band paths through a mesh network. To ensure reliable connections, maximum network design flexibility, and the lowest-cost usable capacity per square mile, both radios can be used simultaneously to form both client and mesh connections. The Tropos 5320 is completely interoperable with the entire family of Tropos MetroMesh routers, enabling easy incremental capacity addition in existing networks without re-engineering or network downtime.
Tropos has significantly enhanced its MetroMesh OS, which is embedded in every Tropos MetroMesh router, including the ability to identify dynamically the combination of links within the mesh that forms the highest performing end-to-end data path from clients to the wired connection to the Internet, even if those links are in different frequency bands. This groundbreaking innovation for metro-scale wireless mesh networks allows service providers and municipalities to use spectrum in the 5 GHz band with the unprecedented flexibility of dynamically shifting to the inherently more reliable 2.4 GHz band for mesh connections in areas where poor 5 GHz propagation causes performance or reliability problems. This flexibility enables the delivery of high capacity mesh networks without the cost associated with the excessive node density necessary with other multi-radio mesh products.
