Indoor deployment of IEEE 802.11s mesh networks: Lessons and guidelines

Emerging wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are known for their fast and low cost deployment. Conventional mesh deployment focuses on the outdoor environment, which regards the WMNs as backbone networks. This study deploys and measures indoor IEEE 802.11s mesh networks to extend WLAN capabilities with extensive experiment configurations. The testbed is constructed in a laboratory and a field crossing three floors of a building. Disagreeing with previous research, the results of this study indicate that RTS/CTS can improve throughput by up to 87.5%. Moreover, compared with the IEEE 802.11b/g, 802.11n achieves better fairness for multi-stream or multi-hop communications. Experimental results also suggest that a longer beacon interval, e.g. 500 ms, can improve channel efficiency for a denser deployment. On the other hand, sparser deployments should use a shorter beacon interval, e.g. 100 ms, to enhance link stability.