THROUGHPUT ANALYSIS OF WIRELESS MESH NETWORK

Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is a combination of both wireless and ad hoc
technologies, thus having the advantages of low cost, reliability and scalability. It is
indeed becoming an appealing choice for the construction of community network to
extend internet services. However, these potentials can not be realized without a
proper study on the performance of WMN in different setups and situations. The
throughput may vary from a single node pair to multiple node pairs and chain links.
Thus this project aims to analyze the throughput of diffurent WMN setups and
hopefully will provide some insights to the behavior of WMN. This project is divided
into two parts. The first part of the project is to understand the theory behind the
WMN technology, its advantages over existing technologies and explore how some of
the networking protocols operate in a working environment. The second part of the
project is concentrated on simulating the network using OPNET. The results show
that WMN with constant traffic has higher throughput than exponential traffic in high
traffic cases, while exponential traffic causes the network throughput to decrease after
a maximum acceptable traffic size. As for the multiple senders to multiple receivers
case, it definitely has higher throughput than a single sender-receiver within the same
area.