Investigating Deployment Strategies for Multi-radio Multi-channel Residential Wireless Mesh Networks

Multi-radio multi-channel Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are being increasingly deployed for broadband provision in enterprise, community, metropolitan and rural areas, due to their lower cost and faster deployment compared to the traditional wired broadband networks. In comparison with the former single-radio WMNs, multi-radio multi-channel WMNs can provide higher capacity and more fine-grained interference management. In this paper, we compare the performance of Wireless Mesh Networks with four different backhaul configurations (with different number of radios, different antenna types and different number of parallel backhauls, etc.) for the deployments in the residential areas. Simulation results show that the interference among client access cells makes the access channel the bottleneck of the end-to-end performance no matter what backhaul configuration is used, and tuning the transmission power of the access channel radio can improve the end-to-end performance substantially. We also find that the multi-radio backhaul WMNs do not have the serious performance unfairness among clients with different hop counts from the gateways as the single-radio backhaul WMNs have.