IEEE 802.16 Wireless Mesh Networks Capacity Estimation Using Collision Domains

Wireless mesh networks (WMN) are considered an attractive alternative to the traditional wired backbone networks for broadband Internet access. However, their capacity is limited due to the nature of the radio channel, which must be shared by the nodes forwarding the traffic from and to the gateway. Therefore, estimating the capacity of WMNs is an important question. The capacity analysis proposed for ad hoc networks can not be directly applied to WMN due to some fundamental differences, e.g. a different traffic pattern and node density. The main contribution of this work is the application of collision domains concept to the 802.16 based WMNs. We consider a simple chain topology but the method can be extended to any arbitrary topology and the real world impairments (interference, fading, etc.) can be easily incorporated in the analysis. The presented results may have important implications for 802.16 mesh networks planning.