A Multi-radio 802.11 Mesh Network Architecture

The focus of this paper is to offer a practical multi-radio mesh network architecture that can realize the benefits of multiple radios. Our architecture provides solutions to challenges in three key areas. The first is the construction of a split wireless router that enables modular wireless mesh routers to be constructed from commodity hardware. The second is the design of a centralized channel assignment algorithm that considers the inter-dependence between channel assignment and routing in order to create high-throughput channel-diversified routes. Third is the design and implementation of several communication protocols that are necessary to make our architecture operational. Our system is comprehensively evaluated on a 20-node multi-radio wireless testbed. Results demonstrate that our architecture makes feasible the deployment of large-scale high-capacity multi-radio mesh networks built entirely with commodity hardware. Our implementation is available to the community for research and development purposes.