Indoor Link Quality Comparison of IEEE 802.11a Channels in a Multi-radio Mesh Network Testbed

The most important criterion for achieving the maximum performance in a wireless mesh network (WMN) is to limit the interference within the network. For this purpose, especially in a multi-radio network, the best option is to use non-overlapping channels among different radios within the same interference range. Previous works that have considered non-overlapping channels in IEEE 802.11a as the basis for performance optimization, have considered the link quality across all channels to be uniform. In this paper, we present a measurement-based study of link quality across all channels in an IEEE 802.11a-based indoor WMN test bed. Our results show that the generalized assumption of uniform performance across all channels does not hold good in practice for an indoor environment and signal quality depends on the geometry around the mesh routers. Keywords—IEEE 802.11a, Indoor Test Bed, Link Quality, Wireless Mesh Networks