Enhancing Multi-Hop Wireless Mesh Networks with a Ring Overlay

Abstract

Wireless mesh network (WMN) has become a popular access network architecture. But because of its multi-hop nature, co-channel interference and contention, the attainable capacity of a wireless node in a WMN is significantly less than the radio capacity. We propose a overlay architecture for a WMN, where a wireless-ring (WRing) is deployed over the regular mesh for carrying wireless mesh traffic only. Our analysis shows that WRing improves the performance of a WMN significantly by reducing the interference and contention.