FIREWORKS project aims to study, design and validate a novel Mesh Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) system concept based on flexible Relay Stations, suitable for OFDM-based WMANs and WLANs, towards their jointly optimised capacity deployment and operation. Mesh topology has the ability to achieve high coverage even in diverse propagation environments (e.g. NLOS, outdoor-to-indoor, and mobile). Obstacles are bypassed by creating multi-hop routes through low-cost relays.

Furthermore, this topology can easily adapt to terrain changes (i.e. in under-development areas) by node relocation or addition. The FIREWORKS project will analyze the capacity improvements of relay enhanced systems compared to conventional single hop P-MP systems for the same area size. Different aspects will be covered such as capacity increase in terms of throughput and range extension of the coverage area, taking also into account techno-economical issues associated with the deployment, operation and maintenance of such systems.

Various solutions and algorithms for the PHY layer will be developed jointly utilising advanced single and multi-user processing and innovative Multi-Transmit Multi-Receive (MTMR) techniques, including MIMO, Spatial Diversity Coding, Spatial Multiplexing, Beam-Forming and Cooperative MTMR. These network capacity enhancing techniques are one of the drivers, the other being the multi-hop architecture, for the design of suitable radio resource management schemes and distributed MAC protocols for Mesh; MAC is one of the major challenges for FIREWORKS.

With hybrid WMAN/WLAN Mesh deployment scenarios envisaged, FIREWORKS will specify several modules and will provide contributions to appropriate standards bodies. Finally, the FIREWORKS prototype validation activity will provide sufficient insight for the evaluation of the economic viability of the relay based network concept and also explore its environmental impact and its social acceptance.