Performance of Wireless Mesh Networks with Three Sector Antenna

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) is an essential technology based on mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). A three sector antenna system applied to WMN was proposed in early 2010, and system performance was analyzed. In this paper, we introduce a real-world three sector antenna system set up in the current WMN test bed in Niigata University, which employs IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN and supports multi-interface and multi-channel. Channel assignment is performed to the system, and two network patterns are acquired. A series of real-world single-flow and multi-flow throughput measuring experiments are performed to the two network patterns using three sector antenna system. The performance and characteristics of the system are discussed. The test bed node has the exchange function of three sector antenna and omni directional antenna. We discuss a preliminary comparison between the two antenna system. And the three sector antenna system achieves much better throughput performance than the omni directional antenna system on the basis of the one-hop throughput measuring experiment.