Meraki's entire product family includes support for mesh networking, enabling networks of wireless repeaters to provide coverage in outdoor and difficult to cable areas. With Meraki's advanced, multi-radio mesh routing protocols and metrics, network administrators no longer have to worry about engineering network topologies and can instead focus on installing access points wherever coverage is needed.

Summary

• Scalable, multi-channel routing protocols
• Advanced metrics for choosing high-performance wireless links
• Multiple gateway support with per-TCP flow connection management
• Automatic failure detection

Multi-Channel, Multi-Radio Routing

In many environments, such as campus, outdoor or industrial environments, wired backhaul infrastructure is unavailable or too expensive to deploy, making it necessary to deploy large networks of wireless repeaters. However, as networks grow in size, the combined number of potential routes and RF channel paths through the network grows exponentially.

Meraki’s state-of-the-art routing protocols are designed to measure the data capacity of each link and determine the best routes for traffic through the network. By constantly measuring frame reception rates on all available links, across a wide range of modulations, Meraki's proprietary routing protocols are able to determine which paths deliver the highest throughput. These measurements also account for the many forms of interference or link failure seen in wireless networks, such as multi-path fading, link asymmetry from interference and environmental changes.

The routing protocols are also integrated with Meraki’s Dynamic RF planning technology, to take advantage of multiple wireless channels and radios whenever possible. In networks with multi-radio devices, the routing protocol will attempt to find full-duplex wireless links wherever possible to eliminate per-hop routing penalties found in single-radio networks. Furthermore, each wireless repeater will evaluate the available wireless channels to maximize overall system capacity and client throughput.

Automatic Gateway Selection

In large networks with dozens or hundreds of repeaters, multiple Internet gateways are required to bear the overall network traffic load, which are often connected to heterogeneous bandwidth providers which each have their own IP addressing schemes. In such cases, the routing protocol and traffic management engine cooperate to ensure user traffic is mapped to the best gateway at all times, while maintaining a consistent mapping for each TCP flow to prevent user-facing interruptions due to changes in wireless conditions.

Meraki access points are also fault-tolerant and will automatically reconfigure to become a mesh access point in the event of a wired link failure. The combination of the routing technologies, automatic failure detection and cloud services enables networks to continue operating despite failures or configuration changes in the rest of the network.