Measurement driven deployment of a two-tier urban mesh access network

Multihop wireless mesh networks can provide Internet access over a wide area with minimal infrastructure expenditure. In this work, we present a measurement driven deployment strategy and a data-driven model to study the impact of design and topology decisions on network-wide performance and cost. We perform extensive measurements in a twotier urban scenario to characterize the propagation environment and correlate received signal strength with application layer throughput. We find that well-known estimates for pathloss produce either heavily overprovisioned networks resulting in an order of magnitude increase in cost for high pathloss estimates or completely disconnected networks for low pathloss estimates. Modeling throughput with wireless interface manufacturer specifications similarly results in severely underprovisioned networks. Further, we measure competing, multihop flow traffic matrices to empirically define achievable throughputs of fully backlogged, rate limited, and web-em...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: MOBISYS
• Authors: Joseph Camp, Joshua Robinson, Christopher Steger, Edward W. Knightly
• Keywords: MOBISYS 2006, Multihop Flow Traffic, Over-estimate Network-wide Throughput, Wireless Mesh Networks, Wireless Networks