Bandwidth Consumption for Providing Fair Internet Access in Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

The contribution of this work is to examine the performance of WMNs concerning bandwidth. Here, we provide a lower bound for bandwidth utilization in mesh networks. We analyze how much bandwidth may be provided to all mesh nodes if they communicate over one wireless communication channel and use the same gateway to the Internet. Even in such a scenario where devices compete on the access to the wireless channel it is possible to operate without bandwidth loss and share this bandwidth uniformly over the set of mesh nodes. This is achievable by optimizing spatial reuse. Here, this is achieved by scheduling channel access using time slots. Of course, this is not possible for every network topology. We measure the fraction of topologies that may operate with a uniformly shared maximum bandwidth