Abstract: Wireless routers having an ADSL or cable connection to content data available via the Internet, a wired connection for connecting local clients in a LAN and a wireless controller for connecting to other wireless routers and clients in a wireless local area networks (WLANs). The WLANs often intersect and therefore it is possible to communicate between wireless routers in order to exchange content data via the wireless LAN in addition to the ADSL or cable connection. Further, each wireless routers has a cache data store to cache content data requested by the user, or any other information sent to the wireless router from another wireless router.

Abstract: Wireless routers having an ADSL or cable connection to content data available via the Internet, a wired connection for connecting local clients in a LAN and a wireless controller for connecting to other wireless routers and clients in a wireless local area networks (WLANs). The WLANs often intersect and therefore it is possible to communicate between wireless routers in order to exchange content data via the wireless LAN in addition to the ADSL or cable connection. Further, each wireless routers has a cache data store to cache content data requested by the user, or any other information sent to the wireless router from another wireless router.

Abstract: A light-weight relay selection mechanism for selecting the most-likely “best” relay station for data transmission from a given source station S to an access point AP uses the Initial Receive Signal Strength (IRSS) to infer the future data transmission rate. In the initialisation stage, the access point AP constructs a table mapping the IRSSs of receivers to eight levels of transmission rate. In the relay selection stage, relay candidates R measure the IRSSs for the source station S and access point AP and report their IRSS levels to the AP. A contention-based mechanism is dedicated to enabling the candidates with higher IRSS levels to report earlier. With this mechanism, the access point AP is able to select the station with the highest estimated data transmission rate.