The nominal capacity of wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks are an alternative technology for last-mile broadband Internet access. In WMNs, similar to ad hoc networks, each user node operates not only as a host but also as a router; user packets are forwarded to and from an Internet-connected gateway in multihop fashion. The meshed topology provides good reliability, market coverage, and scalability, as well as low upfront investments. Despite the recent startup surge in WMNs, much research remains to be done before WMNs realize their full potential. This article tackles the problem of determining the exact capacity of a WMN. The key concept we introduce to enable this calculation is the bottleneck collision domain, defined as the geographical area of the network that bounds from above the amount of data that can be transmitted in the network. We show that for WMNs the throughput of each node decreases as O(1/n), where n is the total number of nodes in the network. In contrast with most existing work on ad hoc network capacity, we do not limit our study to the asymptotic case. In particular, for a given topology and the set of active nodes, we provide exact upper bounds on the throughput of any node. The calculation can be used to provision the network, to ensure quality of service and fairness. The theoretical results are validated by detailed simulations.

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