A goodput distribution model for IEEE 802.11 wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) deliver network services including Internet connectivity, emergency response communications, and cellular traffic offloading. Network planning plays an increasingly important role in ensuring quality of service for such heterogeneous services. Simplicity, usability and accuracy of a model are three elements common to a successful model for network planning. Whilst research has been undertaken to model the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol with good accuracy, these models take a packet centric view thus increasing the model complexity and restricting their usefulness in network planning. We present a novel goodput distribution model for IEEE 802.11 WMNs requiring only topology information and derived specifically to be beneficial to network planning. Analysis shows the model provides accurate estimation of goodput distributions and correctly identifies starving links in a variety of topologies.