On the Capacity and Scalability of Wireless Mesh Networks

Typical wireless mesh networks (WMNs) represent a hybrid solution between infrastructure networks and ad-hoc meshing, and are often regarded as a low-cost alternative technology for last-mile broadband Internet access. In the WMNs each node potentially acts as a relay, forwarding traffic generated by other nodes. However, the theoretical framework that determines the performance of WMN is still illegible. Derived from the existing results, this paper investigates the capacity bottlenecks on WMNs and then provides mathematical models for the cumulative capacity with the user sending probability and the number of forward nodes that correspond to the payload, the density of nodes and the number of nodes. The models are the very accurate and reliable in predicting the scalability and the cumulative throughput capacity.