In today’s world, reliable wireless connectivity is essential for devices to communicate with each other and access the internet without the need for physical cables. However, maintaining a stable wireless connection can be a challenge, especially for moving machines. Factors such as physical obstacles and distance can disrupt networks, leading to poor signal strength, slow data speeds, and dropped connections. Meshmerize offers an industry-grade wireless mesh networks solution designed to address these challenges. Our unique approach uses multi-path routing to allow machines to roam smoothly and effortlessly without interference or handovers. This ensures reliable and low-latency communication between machines, robots, vehicles, and people, even in constantly changing environments.

Moreover, Meshmerize goes above and beyond to provide a stable connection that is essential for uninterrupted workflow in industrial settings. While mesh networks have their pros and cons, our solution smartly overcomes typical soft spots in both mesh networking and industrial connectivity, ensuring a stable connection that keeps the workflow going with no interruptions.

To give you a better understanding of Meshmerize, let’s take a closer look at its key features.

 

Meshmerize mesh networks explained: You move, we connect.

 

Seamless Roaming

Roaming is a common and often frustrating problem faced by the industrial wireless professionals. In a traditional network, devices are organized into multiple hub-and-spoke systems, with access points (APs) serving as hubs for the transmission of data to the clients (such as robots, laptops, and smartphones) serving as spokes of the system.

However, this topology has a major drawback: as devices move from one physical space to another, they must deregister from one AP and register onto another, which can take anywhere from a few hundred milliseconds to several seconds. This valuable time in which the device is offline poses a threat to the operations and safety of the machines.

Meshmerize offers a radical solution to this problem by enabling devices to stay connected at all times. Say goodbye to disconnections as your nodes roam around freely.

Since wireless is a shared medium, it is possible for devices to always hear each other and help each other out. With Meshmerize, all devices can communicate not only with the APs but also with each other. Newer connections are made well before the old ones fade away. This effectively overcomes the roaming problem because Meshmerize allows devices to connect to multiple APs simultaneously, eliminating roaming handover times and keeping operations running smoothly.

 

Circumventing Dark Zones

Network professionals are all too familiar with the challenge posed by Radio Dark Zones or Radio Shadows. Radio dark zones are area s with very low signal strength that are typically caused by physical objects that block or interfere with radio waves.

In constantly changing industrial environments, radio shadows can appear and disappear quickly, making it difficult to get accurate measurements and ensure reliable coverage. Designing a wireless network without radio dark zones is a big challenge, particularly in constantly changing environments, leading to oversized and expensive networks. But if left there, dark zones tend to be black holes where machinery loses connectivity and becomes untethered and useless, leading to huge losses in productivity.

Meshmerize provides a way to mitigate the ill effects of dynamic dark zones without completely eliminating them. Meshmerize relays messages using all nodes, ensuring that the devices stay connected even in challenging conditions. As long as nodes can detect at least one other node (it doesn’t need to be their intended AP), the network operates smoothly. Thanks to this approach, nodes smartly work together to overcome the drawbacks of radio-dark zones.

 

Mesh Networks Deployment Superpowers

 

High Scalability

A widely known shortcoming of many wireless mesh networks is the inability to scale up the number of network participants due to redundancy in packet transmissions.

Meshmerize overcomes this challenge through its smart multi-path routing algorithm, providing high scalability thereby enabling hundreds of devices to participate in a single mesh network. Meshmerize prioritizes higher reliability, meaning it will keep the connections strong, even under heavy use. Our customers have already deployed Meshmerize successfully in warehouses with 100+ robots, enabling them to operate at breathtaking scale and efficiency.

 

Truly wireless Mesh Networks Expansion

Cabling can be expensive and cumbersome. For many situations, the ideal way to expand a wireless network is by just adding another access point to the network.

Meshmerize enables you to add access points to your network seamlessly. As long as you’re able to provide power to an access point running Meshmerize (that’s right – no ethernet, just power), it can connect itself automatically to the existing network wirelessly and enables you to quickly expand your network’s coverage area.

Additionally, we are also working on creating solar and battery-powered Mesh nodes, which can expand your network truly wirelessly.

 

Hive – Mesh Networks Management

Decentralized systems can be challenging to manage. This is why we created the Hive – our network management system. Hive offers a range of features designed to help configure, analyze, troubleshoot, manage, and upgrade each node in mesh networks.

Hive allows you to visualize and optimize your network on an ongoing basis, ensuring that your operations run smoothly. And if any issues do arise, you’ll have the tools you need to quickly identify and resolve them.

 

Purely Software solution

Meshmerize is hardware-independent, giving you the freedom to choose any commercial off-the-shelf device that suits your needs.

Meshmerize can be easily installed on a wide variety of devices, as long as they run Linux and have supported radio hardware. This means you can “meshmerize” any WiFi device or even directly install it on your robots.

And if you’re not sure where to start, don’t worry – we’ve already tested Meshmerize on a variety of industrial off-the-shelf access points. We have integrated Meshmerize into hardware used for various needs, including deep freeze conditions, rugged outdoor requirements, lightweight drone-friendly, DIN-Rail mounted, PoE capability, and ATEX certification. Since it can be installed on most Linux-based systems, including OpenWRT, Yocto, and other Linux distros, you can also easily integrate Meshmerize into your existing infrastructure.

Go ahead, break those hardware chains and meshmerize freely!

 

Smarter Traffic Management in Mesh Networks

 

Prioritized Traffic

Not all traffic in a wireless network has to be treated equally. It can be very useful to prioritize the traffic flowing through a wireless network, especially to ensure greater safety and reliability of machinery. For example, it is more critical to send control signals to a drone than to receive video feeds from the drone. Nobody wants their drone to crash just because it was trying to stream video in UHD.

To make this problem easier for you, Meshmerize enables you to utilize a single network connection for transporting different types of data packets with varying priorities. In the above example, Meshmerize can enable you to set a higher priority for the control signals and a lower priority for the video stream, providing reliable connectivity between the drones and the controller even if there’s a drop in wireless signal strength.

Meshmerize achieves message prioritization through some knobs and levers built into it, such as preferentially relaying important messages through multiple redundant paths using our patented multipath routing algorithm.

 

Optimized broadcasting

One of the standout features of Meshmerize is its ability to deliver broadcast messages efficiently through the mesh networks. This can be incredibly useful for sending safety beacons and other time-sensitive messages to all participants in the network. Meshmerize provides this high-reliability, low-latency broadcast mechanism as a standard feature, so you can take advantage of it right out of the box.

Whether you need to send critical updates, hit emergency brakes, alert your team to potential hazards, or simply communicate important information, Meshmerize makes it easy to get your message out fast.

Supports all types of traffic

Meshmerize is more than just standard mesh networks – it’s a versatile solution that can support all types of traffic. Meshmerize can operate on Layer 2, providing connectivity for any protocol, to every corner. Simply put, Meshmerize functions like a wireless switch, allowing traffic between any device that “plugs-in ” (wirelessly ofcourse).

Whether you need to carry Internet, Profinet, Modbus, CANBus, or any other type of traffic, Meshmerize efficiently handles all of it. It exposes itself as a virtual ethernet device, making it transparent to the applications using it.

Rising up to the challenge with mesh networks

Last but not least, it is worth noting the user-friendliness. Meshmerize is easy and simple to set up, meaning that facility operators can deploy it themselves without requiring extensive technical expertise. Of course, support is always available.

Meshmerize is a mesh networking solution that rises up to the challenge for many industrial use cases, particularly those with dynamic environments. From intralogistics to autonomous construction, Meshmerize has already demonstrated its value through real deployments and research projects. Its features make it a reliable and practical choice for deployments of all sizes.

Whether it’s simply providing 100% coverage in challenging environments, scaling up to meet growing demands, or making sure all the necessary data or goods get to the destination on time, Meshmerize is successful in completing the task.

 

Meshmerize is a startup based in Dresden, Germany that provides the ultimate mesh networks software to an array of industries. The full potential of Meshmerize is yet to be seen. We would like to hear your thoughts – let us know what you think at [email protected]