Performance of urban mesh networks

  • Authors:

  • Vinay Sridhara;Jonghyun Kim;Stephan Bohacek

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Delaware, Newark, DE;University of Delaware, Newark, DE;University of Delaware, Newark, DE

  • Venue:
  • MSWiM '05 Proceedings of the 8th ACM international symposium on Modeling, analysis and simulation of wireless and mobile systems
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Currently, large-scale deployments of mesh networks are being planned for Philadelphia as well as other cities. The performance of such networks has never been examined through simulation or through any other means. In this paper we perform detailed simulations of mesh networks in several urban environments and evaluate the performance of these networks. The simulations utilize realistic ray-tracing and other propagation models. The mobility of nodes is based on models derived from several movement and time use surveys including the US Department of Labor's recent time use study that includes travel diaries from over 20,000 people. Basic performance issues such as connectivity, capacity, and several application oriented performance metrics as a function of the density infrastructure (base stations and fix wireless relays) are examined. It is found that a high density infrastructure is required to achieve reasonable coverage, in particular, the density must be higher than is currently considered by most deployments. While allowing mobile nodes to act as relays improves coverage, it does not necessarily improve the performance received by the application. It is found that in general, there is a significant difference between the fraction of nodes that are able to communicate with a base station and the fraction of nodes that received acceptable application layer performance.