2026-10-11T13:39:34Z https://drops.dagstuhl.de/oai

oai:drops-oai.dagstuhl.de:25595 2026-06-23T10:09:57Z ddc:004 open_access

Scalable Routing in a City-Scale Wi-Fi Network for Disaster Recovery Liu, Ziqian Chabra, Om Lynch, James Martin, Aaron Li, Chenning Balakrishnan, Hari mesh networking disaster recovery geographic routing scalability Wi-Fi This paper presents CityMesh, a city-scale decentralized mesh network designed for disaster recovery and emergency scenarios. When wide-area Internet connectivity is unavailable or severely degraded, CityMesh leverages both static access points and mobile devices equipped with Wi-Fi to provide intra-city connectivity and reach opportunistic gateways to the Internet (e.g., via satellite links). The main contribution of this paper is a scalable routing protocol that supports millions of devices, addressing a long-standing limitation of wireless mesh and mobile ad hoc networks. Unlike prior approaches, CityMesh exploits rich building-location and building-geometry data from widely available city maps to guide route computation, improving packet delivery while significantly reducing transmission overhead. Simulation results from 70 cities show that CityMesh improves packet delivery rates by 88% over WEAVE (a state-of-the-art geographic routing protocol). A campus-scale deployment of 300 Wi-Fi devices across 31 buildings shows the practical deployability of CityMesh. These results demonstrate the promise of map-aware routing as a foundation for scalable, resilient city-wide Wi-Fi networks. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Ziqian Liu and Om Chabra and James Lynch and Aaron Martin and Chenning Li and Hari Balakrishnan 2026 Is Part Of OASIcs, Volume 139, 1st New Ideas in Networked Systems (NINeS 2026) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/OASIcs.NINeS.2026.10 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-255954 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/OASIcs.NINeS.2026.10 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode