Connectivity Model for Wireless Mesh Networks

This paper presents a novel methodology for finding the network connectivity in wireless mesh networks while taking into account dependencies between links of geometrically co- located nodes, as well as the reduced connectivity of boundary nodes. A closed form expression to find the upper bound for the network connectivity of a triangular lattice topology was derived. A comparison study between models that assume independent nodes´ connectivities and our model shows that the commonly used assumption of link independence almost always underestimate the network connectivity. This work also shows that the effect of boundary nodes on the network connectivity can not be eliminated by assuming an infinitely large network since the assumption overestimates the network connectivity by a non negligible amount. The analysis also shows that the error due to either assumption depends on the link connectivity as well as the network size, and can be very significant.