New technologies are being tested to cope with the expected growth of the network. Upgrading the backbone links between network nodes to use 802.11a or 802.11g technology (max. 54 Mbit/s) [WCompare,IEEE] is in test.
Also in evaluation is the use of more complex and advanced technologies using mesh or ad-hoc networking [Hu,Maltz,Royer]. Imagine a network where all clients are also a node and every client is connected to the two or three closest other clients (close is defined here as the distance at which one is able to create a good (signal to noise ratio) connection at that particular moment in time), not to a central node in the neighborhood. The noise floor would remain at the same level as the network gets more dense while the number of possible parallel paths from A to B also grows with the number of clients. More clients lead to shorter paths which will result in less RF power needed to obtain the same connection quality. Each new participant brings along his or her own piece of network, bandwidth and noise-reduction.
Using these techniques, advanced routing architectures auch as AODV may be used. The Ad hoc On Demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol [AODV,aodv-ietf] is an ``on demand'' routing algorithm, only creating routes when they are actually needed. AODV is loop-free and scales to large numbers of mobile nodes.
Another point of evaluation is the use of applications that require Quality of Service (QoS) facilities in the network such as IP telephony and wide band video streaming.