Capacity of grid-oriented wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networking technology has gained prominence in recent years with a diverse range of applications from small community-based networks to metropolitan area networks. Such mesh networks typically comprise a wireless backbone connected to the wired infrastructure with wireless client residing at the edge. The wireless routers and access points of a wireless mesh network (WMN) are connected by shared links that often use the same channel. The capacity of a WMN depends on several factors such as network size and topology, traffic profile, number of radio interfaces per node, number of radio channels, channel assignment scheme, routing algorithm etc. In this paper, we describe an analytical framework for capacity estimation using the notion of collision domains. Furthermore, we analyse the capacity of WMNs under various scenarios to study the impact of different network parameters.