Design and management of wireless mesh networks

无线网状网络（WMNs）由固定的无线路由器组成，这些路由器通过无线链路相互连接，其中一小部分通过有线（例如以太网）或无线（例如WIMAX）链路充当到互联网的网关。wmn面临的主要挑战之一是支持高吞吐量。最大可用带宽随着网状网络中源和目的地之间距离的增加而迅速降低（即，在移动设备和互联网网关之间穿越的无线路由器的数量）；这种退化是由于邻近跳和路径的干扰造成的。例如，在具有相同和全向无线电范围的网络中，从单跳到两跳将使流的吞吐量减半。这对于希望提供人们习惯的有线网络的延迟/吞吐量水平的网络提供商来说可能是灾难性的。

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) consist of stationary wireless routers interconnected by wireless links with a small fraction acting as gateways to the Internet via wired (e.g., Ethernet) or wireless (e.g., WIMAX) links. One of the key challenges facing WMNs is supporting high throughput. The maximum available bandwidth degrades rapidly with increasing distance between the source and destination in the mesh network (i.e., the number of wireless routers traversed between the mobile device and the gateway to the Internet); this degradation is caused due to interference from neighboring hops and paths. For example, in a network with identical and omnidirectional radio ranges, going from a single hop to two hops halves the throughput of a flow. This can be disastrous for network providers eying to provide the level of latency/throughput people are accustomed to with their wired networks.