Wireless Mesh

Wireless Mesh Networking Concepts

Single, Dual, and Multi Radio Meshes

There are three basic design concepts attributed to wireless mesh networking.

Single Radio Mesh

Single radio mesh networks are the very basic and worst design possible in mesh networking. The concept is that all AP traffic is shared by the wireless clients and backhaul on one radio on one single channel.

The result is that as more AP's are added the more traffic is dedicated to the backhaul and less bandwidth is available for the clients resulting in very poor speeds. Coupled with the fact that the AP cannot send and recieve at the same time results in in a huge degradation in service and unpredictable latency. Single radio meshes do not scale to large networks.

Dual Radio Mesh

In a dual radio mesh, one radio is designed for client access while the second radio deals with the backhaul traffic. This solution provides many advantages over single radio mesh networks, however the throuput problems still exists in dual radio meshes as the backhaul radio deals with inbound and outbound traffic with the end result being bottlenecked backhaul traffic.

Multi Radio Mesh or Structured Mesh

Multi radio mesh networks are by far the most advanced and scaleable type of mesh networks. These type of mesh networks consist of at least three radio mesh nodes. One or more radios deal with wireless clients and 2 or more radios dedicated for backhaul and forwardhaul. The result is that you have a scalable and high throughput mesh.

Ran out of time, more to come very soon......