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This chapter presents IEEE 802.11s, an emerging standard for wireless mesh networks (WMNs). IEEE 802.11s proposes multi-hop forwarding at the MAC level, which is a new approach for building WMNs. Traditional solutions for WMNs use network-level routing protocols to allow multi-hop forwarding among wireless mesh nodes. IEEE 802.11s specifies multi-hop MAC functions for mesh nodes using a mandatory path selection mechanism named HWMP (Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol) and also provides a path selection framework for alternative mechanisms and future extensions. This chapter discusses the emerging standard details and compares this new solution for WMNs to traditional ones.

Multi-hop communication will become an important technology to reduce energy consumption and prolong network lifetime in wireless sensor network(WSN). One of the major causes for energy consumption is the radio transmission energy, which is proportional to the 2nd or 4th power of the transmission distance in general. Communication between two nodes can be further broadened to multi-hop communications in which a node may help other nodes communicate with each other. In this paper, we research a scenario of multi-hop communication where one node may help other node to transmit data. We derive the average energy efficiency under Rayleigh fading channels, and compare with single-hop communication.