Analysis of Capacity Improvements in Multi-Radio Wireless Mesh Networks

In this paper, we argue that additional radios should be placed according to the distribution of traffic load in WMN. We show that the capacity of a WMN is constrained by the bottleneck collision domain; hence, placing an equal number of radios at all nodes is not necessary. Only collision domains that need to support higher traffic load should be given more bandwidth by setting up additional radios, so that interfering wireless links would operate on different channels, avoiding interference and enabling multiple parallel transmissions. Furthermore, we determine the upper bound on capacity improvements, and show that much less radios are required compared to conventional k-NIC architectures