THROUGHPUT ANALYSIS OF WIRELESS MESH NETWORK

Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is a combination of both wireless and ad hoc technologies, thus having the advantages of low cost, reliability and scalability. It is indeed becoming an appealing choice for the construction of community network to extend internet services. However, these potentials can not be realized without a proper study on the performance of WMN in different setups and situations. The throughput may vary from a single node pair to multiple node pairs and chain links. Thus this project aims to analyze the throughput of diffurent WMN setups and hopefully will provide some insights to the behavior of WMN. This project is divided into two parts. The first part of the project is to understand the theory behind the WMN technology, its advantages over existing technologies and explore how some of the networking protocols operate in a working environment. The second part of the project is concentrated on simulating the network using OPNET. The results show that WMN with constant traffic has higher throughput than exponential traffic in high traffic cases, while exponential traffic causes the network throughput to decrease after a maximum acceptable traffic size. As for the multiple senders to multiple receivers case, it definitely has higher throughput than a single sender-receiver within the same area