Cooperation Incentives Between Wireless Mesh Network Operators

In wireless mesh networks, low transmission rate links create bottlenecks that degrade the end-to-end throughput. To make matters worse, low rate links de-grade the performance of neighboring links that operate on the same channel, due to the long duration of low rate transmissions and the per-packet fairness of the 802.11 MAC protocol. One approach for mitigating the performance degradation due to low rate links is to consider routing protocols with metrics such as ETT, WCETT and CATT, which take the transmission rate into account. In wireless LANs, another approach is to use relay nodes in order improve performance by having multiple high rate transmissions instead of a single low rate transmission.