On the performance of beamforming-based channel assignment in dense wireless mesh networks

Communication links in multi-radio multichannel (MRMC) wireless mesh networks (WMNs) can be beamformed by using the multiple omni-directional antennas of a multi-radio mesh node in the form of a linear antenna array. We recently developed the first channel assignment (CA) method for linear array beamformed (LAB) links in MRMC WMNs. In this paper we use this new LAB-CA to conduct the first in-depth analysis of the effectiveness of using beamformed communication links in MRMC WMNs to improve spatial channel reuse. Using LAB links is shown to significantly outperform omni-directional links, in terms of the number of frequency channels required and the links-to-channels ratio, with the advantage increasing dramatically for dense networks.