Feasibility study of mesh networks for all-wireless offices

There is a fair amount of evidence that mesh (static multihop wireless) networks are gaining popularity, both in the academic literature and in the commercial space. Nonetheless, none of the prior work has evaluated the feasibility of applications on mesh through the use of deployed networks and real user traffic. The state of the art is the use of deployed testbeds with synthetic traces consisting of random traffic patterns. In this paper, we evaluate the feasibility of a mesh network for an all-wireless office using traces of office users and an actual 21-node multi-radio mesh testbed in an office area. Unlike previous mesh studies that have examined routing design in detail, we examine how different office mesh design choices impact the performance of user traffic. From our traces of 11 users spanning over a month, we identify 3 one hour trace periods with different characteristics and evaluate network performance for them. In addition, we consider different user-server placement, ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: MOBISYS
• Authors: Jakob Eriksson, Sharad Agarwal, Paramvir Bahl, Jitendra Padhye
• Keywords: 21-node Multi-radio Mesh, Mesh Network, MOBISYS 2006, Traffic Load Period, Wireless Networks