Wireless mesh networks (WMN) have attracted considerable interest in recent years as a convenient, flexible and low-cost alternative to wired communication infrastructures in many contexts. However, the great majority of research on metropolitan-scale WMN has been centered around maximization of available bandwidth, suitable for non-real-time applications such as Internet access for the general public. On the other hand, the suitability of WMN for mission-critical infrastructure applications remains by and large unknown, as protocols typically employed in WMN are, for the most part, not designed for real-time communications. In this paper, we describe the Smart Transport and Roads Communications (STaRComm) project at National ICT Australia (NICTA), which sets a goal of designing a wireless mesh network architecture to solve the communication needs of the traffic control system in Sydney, Australia. This system, known as SCATS (Sydney Coordinated Adaptive Traffic System) and used in ove...