Performance in a Multihop Mesh Network

We now analyze the performance of SSCH in a large scale multihop network without mobility. We place 100 nodes uniformly in a $200 \times 200$ m area, and set each node to transmit with a power of 21 dBm. The Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) [22] protocol is used to discover the source route between different source-destination pairs. These source routes are then fed into a static variant of DSR that does not perform discovery or maintain routes. We vary the number of maximum rate UDP flows from 10 to 50. We generate source and destination pairs by choosing randomly, and rejecting pairs that are within a single hop of each other.

Figure 16: Mulithop Mesh Network of 100 Nodes: Average flow throughput on varying the number of flows in the network.

We present the average flow throughput in Figure 16. Increasing the number of flows leads to greater contention, and the average throughput of both SSCH and IEEE 802.11a drops. For every considered number of flows, SSCH provides significantly higher throughput than IEEE 802.11a. For 50 flows, the inefficiencies of sharing a single channel are sufficiently pronounced that SSCH yields more than a factor of 15 capacity improvement.