Analysis of Bottleneck Delay and Throughput in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networking has emerged as a promising technology in providing economical and scalable broadband Internet accesses. A wireless mesh network consists of mesh routers and mesh clients, connected in an ad hoc manner via wireless links. A subset of the mesh routers, referred to as gateway nodes, are capable of external Internet connections. Since other mesh routers and clients have to access the Internet through the gateway nodes, these nodes can easily become bottlenecks in the network. In this paper, we present a novel queuing model based analysis of the delay and throughput of the gateway nodes. Our simulation results suggest that the analytical results are quite accurate, which provides an effective guideline for gateway-related design and optimization in wireless mesh networks