Capacity Analysis of Wireless Mesh Networks

The next generation wireless networks experienced a great development with emergence of wireless mesh networks (WMNs), which can be regarded as a realistic solution that provides wireless broadband access. The limited available bandwidth makes capacity analysis of the network very essential. While the network offers broadband wireless access to community and enterprise users, the problems that limit the network capacity must be addressed to exploit the optimum network performance. The wireless mesh network capacity analysis shows that the throughput of each mesh node degrades in order of l/n with increasing number of nodes (n) in a linear topology. The degradation is found to be higher in a fully mesh network as a result of increase in interference and MAC layer contention in the network