Throughput Capacity Analysis of Large Wireless Mesh Networks, Impact of the Number of Channels and Interfaces

As various wireless networks develop into the next generation to provide better services for users, a key technology, wireless mesh networks (WMNs), has emerged recently. An infrastructure wireless mesh network (InfWMN) is a hierarchical network, consists of mesh clients, mesh routers and gateways. The mesh routers form a wireless mesh infrastructure, to which the mesh clients are connected using star topology. To further improve the flexibility of mesh networking, a mesh router is usually equipped with multiple wireless interfaces. Research into the analytical solutions for the capacity of the InfWMNs is highly topical. The previous analytical solutions have only exposed the asymptotic per-client throughput capacity of either single-channel InfWMNs or multi-channel InfWMNs provided that each infrastructure node (i.e. wireless mesh routers and gateways), has a dedicated interface per-channel. From the previous analytical results, there are lacks of studies that address the more practical cases where the number of interfaces per node is less than the number of channels. In this thesis, we derive an original analysis of the asymptotic per-client throughput capacity of multi-channel InfWMNs in which the number of interfaces per infrastructure nodes, denoted by m, is less than or equal to the number of channels, c. To best of our knowledge, up to the time of this study there is no research on the throughput capacity analysis of the InfWMNs in which the location of infrastructure nodes is random. In this study we considered two different scenarios to examine the asymptotic per-client throughput capacity of multi-channel InfWMNs. In the first scenario it is assumed that the location of wireless mesh routers and gateways are arbitrary, i.e. infrastructure nodes are placed in any deterministic manner, but in the second scenario we considered that the wireless mesh routers are distributed at random in the surface of a disk with unit area, however the location of gateways is still arbitrary. In both scenarios mesh clients are randomly distributed within the area of the network. Our analysis reveals that the asymptotic per-client throughput capacity of the multi-channel InfWMNs has different bounds, which dependent on the ratio between c and m.