Measurements and Evaluations for an IEEE 802.11a Based Carrier-Grade Multi-radio Wireless Mesh Network Deployment

Although there currently exists a number of Wireless Local Area Network based mesh network deployments most have been deployed to provide best effort broadband Internet access. Consequently, they cannot meet the requirements of network operators in order to utilise these networks to offer carrier grade services. The goal of providing carrier grade services over a wireless mesh infrastructure requires high performance in terms of throughput and reliability. One way of achieving this increase in performance is to utilise multi-radio Mesh Nodes, however, due to the Physical Layer layer limitations of 802.11a this can have significant problems. This paper analyses these issues and investigates what performance can be expected when frequency multiplexing is considered. The results presented in this paper are based on real measurements taken from multi-radio Mesh Nodes and are evaluated using statistical algorithms. The main contribution of this paper is an analysis of the impact of the Adjacent Channel Interference effect in 802.11a based multi-radio Mesh Nodes.