Impact of power control on capacity of large scale Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as low-cost alternative for broadband access networks in metropolitan area. In this paper, we revisit power control as a network layer problem in design of WMNs. Specifically, we show that increasing power levels of nodes in WMNs actually results into throughput improvements in node-to-gateway traffic pattern. It is proven that WMNs can achieve per node throughput of O(1/¿n) where ¿ is factor dependent on hop-radius of the network, which in turn is reliant on power control. Also, it is shown that in case of multiple gateways, increasing power levels of nodes is more cost-effective because it results into increased throughput with fewer number of gateways.