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DOI: 10.4230/OASIcs.NINeS.2026.10

Scalable Routing in a City-Scale Wi-Fi Network for Disaster Recovery

Authors: Ziqian Liu, Om Chabra, James Lynch, Aaron Martin, Chenning Li, and Hari Balakrishnan

Published in: OASIcs, Volume 139, 1st New Ideas in Networked Systems (NINeS 2026)

Abstract

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.

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Ziqian Liu, Om Chabra, James Lynch, Aaron Martin, Chenning Li, and Hari Balakrishnan. Scalable Routing in a City-Scale Wi-Fi Network for Disaster Recovery. In 1st New Ideas in Networked Systems (NINeS 2026). Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 139, pp. 10:1-10:31, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026)

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@InProceedings{liu_et_al:OASIcs.NINeS.2026.10,
  author =	{Liu, Ziqian and Chabra, Om and Lynch, James and Martin, Aaron and Li, Chenning and Balakrishnan, Hari},
  title =	{{Scalable Routing in a City-Scale Wi-Fi Network for Disaster Recovery}},
  booktitle =	{1st New Ideas in Networked Systems (NINeS 2026)},
  pages =	{10:1--10:31},
  series =	{Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-414-7},
  ISSN =	{2190-6807},
  year =	{2026},
  volume =	{139},
  editor =	{Argyraki, Katerina and Panda, Aurojit},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/OASIcs.NINeS.2026.10},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-255954},
  doi =		{10.4230/OASIcs.NINeS.2026.10},
  annote =	{Keywords: mesh networking, disaster recovery, geographic routing, scalability, Wi-Fi}
}

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Scalable Routing in a City-Scale Wi-Fi Network for Disaster Recovery

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