Engineering wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks are considered as a potentially attractive alternative to provide broadband access to users. They have been studied extensively by the research community since they raised a lot of new issues due to their unique characteristics. Here, we focus on scenarios where these networks are installed and managed to provide broadband access to a set of fixed nodes. While a lot of research has been done on this type of networks, there are very few insightful engineering results that can help network operators deploy and manage such networks. It is the objective of this paper to present some major engineering insights on such networks. We limit our scope to networks that are single rate and in which all nodes use the same transmit power. In particular, we quantify the advantage of multi-hop over single-hop. We illustrate the importance of multi-path routing over single path routing, and of optimal routing versus min-hop routing. We revisit the notion of spatial reuse. Finally we present results showing the importance of selecting an appropriate interference model.