Understanding IEEE 802.11n multi-hop communication in wireless networks

In this paper, we present a measurement study of the multi-hop behavior of the new IEEE 802.11n standard in an indoor mesh testbed. As main contribution, we quantitatively describe characteristics of IEEE 802.11n on multi-hop paths like throughput, aggregate size and utilized MIMO features. Furthermore, we show how to build an IEEE 802.11n indoor testbed capable of multi-hop communication. In an 8-hop chain topology, we observe that channel bonding nearly doubles the throughput for any fixed path length. The mean aggregate size in number of frames at each node is also doubled by channel bonding. The aggregate size decreases with increasing path length. Limiting the aggregate size severely impacts throughput both on single and multi-hop paths. The throughput degrades as the path length is increased as in legacy IEEE 802.11a/b/g. We believe that these findings will enhance the understanding of the performance of IEEE 802.11n in multi-hop networks.