Capacity Scaling with Multiple Radios and Multiple Channels in Wireless Mesh Networks

Many portable client devices such as PDAs, laptops and cell phones are already equipped with multiple wireless radios, as are infrastructure side elements like access points and base stations. In this article, we argue that the increasing availability of such multiple radio nodes, in conjunction with a suitably structured multi-hop or mesh architecture, has the potential to mitigate some of the key limitations of present day wireless access networks that do not exploit the presence of multiradios (i.e., network nodes that use single radios). While in this work we concentrate on emerging next-generation 802.11 WLAN based network devices and architectural concepts, the ideas ar e also pertinent to other unlicensed wireless networks, such as thos e based on the 802.16 standard.