Investigating Depth-Fanout Trade-Off in WiMAX Mesh Networks

peer reviewedIn the last years, Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have been an emerging technology for providing cost/effective broadband Internet access. The research done insofar usually assumes that the wireless backbone of a WMN is built using IEEE 802.11 technologies. Such an approach has the drawback of leading to dense and sub-optimal deployments, due to the short transmission range of this standard. Recently standardized, the WiMAX technology is supposed to transcend this limitation by a transmission range of several miles. In particular, the mesh mode of the WiMAX standard enables direct communications between subscriber stations and, hence, reduces dead zones while increasing the global throughput. In this paper, we investigate the throughput capacity of a WiMAX mesh tree. More specifically, we are interested in balancing the impact of the depth of the tree with its fanout. We provide a traffic model and evaluate the WiMAX mesh tree by simulations