performance analysis of wireless mesh networks with three sector antennas
A wireless mesh network (WMN) is one of important applications for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Most researches about WMN employ IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN in wireless links. IEEE 802.11 supports multiple channels. Performance improvement strategies by using multiple interfaces and multiple channels were discussed. In this paper, we propose to apply a 3-sector antenna system to multi-interface and multi-channel WMN. In cellular networks, the 3-sector antenna system is widely used for enhancement of user capacity. Further improvement will be obtained if the 3-sector antenna system is applied to WMN. WMN has different features from cellular networks. In particular, the hidden node and exposed node problems are very important in WMN. The 3-sector antenna system is compared with the omni-directional antenna systems in terms of contention and collision rates. As a result, both rates of the 3-sector antenna system is smaller than or equal to those of the omni-directional antenna systems. The throughput is also analyzed with the consideration of hidden and exposed node problems. From the numerical results of the throughput analysis, the 3-sector antenna system achieves much better throughput performance than those of the omni-directional antenna systems.
wireless mesh network sector antenna channel allocation