Engineering wireless mesh networks

Abstract

Wireless mesh networks are considered as a potentially

attractive alternative to provide broadband access to users.

They have been studied extensively by the research community

since they raised a lot of new issues due to their unique

characteristics. Here, we focus on scenarios where these networks

are installed and managed to provide broadband access to a

set of fixed nodes. While a lot of research has been done on

this type of networks, there are very few insightful engineering

results that can help network operators deploy and manage such

networks. It is the objective of this paper to present some major

engineering insights on such networks. We limit our scope to

networks that are single rate and in which all nodes use the

same transmit power. In particular, we quantify the advantage of

multi-hop over single-hop. We illustrate the importance of multipath

routing over single path routing, and of optimal routing

versus min-hop routing. We revisit the notion of spatial reuse.

Finally we present results showing the importance of selecting

an appropriate interference model.