Can the Current Generation of Wireless Mesh Networks Compete With Cellular Voice?

Wireless mesh networks are being deployed to provide broadband wireless connectivity to city-wide hotspots. The typical architecture in these deployments thus far is single-radio architecture: mesh nodes carry only one radio, which is used both to receive the traffic from the clients and to relay this traffic through the mesh to the wired Internet gateway. In this paper, the authors study the performance of a representative single-radio mesh network both in a live setup and in a laboratory environment. They characterize the performance of different applications (e.g. VoIP), and study some key challenges of mesh networks such as the fairness in bandwidth allocation and hidden node terminal.