Analysis of WMN-GA Simulation Results: WMN Performance Optimizing the Number of Mesh Routers

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are attracting a lot of attention from wireless network researchers. Node placement problems have been investigated for a long time in the optimization field due to numerous applications in location science. In our previous work, we evaluated WMN-GA system which is based on Genetic Algorithms (GAs) to find an optimal location assignment for mesh routers. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of two different distributions of mesh clients considering Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), throughput and delay metrics. For simulations, we used ns-3 and Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol (HWMP). We compare the performance of the optimized network component for normal and uniform distributions of mesh clients by sending multiple Constant Bit Rate (CBR) flows in the network. The simulation results show that for normal distribution, all mesh routers are concentrated in the center of grid and the communication becomes easy. On the other hand, for uniform distribution the mesh routers are more scattered, the creating of links is more difficult and the communication can be done only with multiple hops. The increase of number of connections, increases the traffic data rate and the network load causing a decrease of the average PDR and throughput for one connection.