Performance evaluation of alternative routing in a wireless mesh network with an adaptive array

In a wireless mesh network (WMN), the interference from active links in the vicinity of the node of interest is frequently not negligible and thus degrades the area spectral efficiency. An adaptive array is capable to control not only beams but also nulls. Thus, it is expected to help new link establishment. Moreover, the alternative routing boosts such spatial link multiplexing by decreasing the nodes in the stand-by state. In the paper, we evaluate the system throughput performance of the alternative routing in a WMN with an adaptive array of three elements. The evaluation results show that the alternative routing is very effective in the case of a gateway access model or when the average hop counts in the network is not so small.