On connectivity and capacity of wireless mesh networks

Wireless Mesh Networks represent an interesting technology due to their reliability, broad coverage and relatively easy and inexpensive scalability. The architecture is mainly a hybrid solution between ad-hoc and infrastructure networking, where each node potentially acts as a relay, forwarding traffic generated by other nodes. Even if solutions are already available, many research topics have yet to be investigated, as no theoretical studies are available to determine the performance of such networking paradigm. In this work, we aim at providing mathematical expressions for connectivity and cumulative capacity of a mesh network on the basis of the network configuration, in order to provide guiding principles in mesh networks' design and development. An analytical approach is used in determining the connectivity probability, while the "bottleneck collision domain" concept is adopted to estimate capacity. The framework is further validated through comparison with simulation results.