ABSTRACT
Acknowledgment............................................................................... 259 References.......................................................................................... 259
The wireless mesh network (WMN) is an economical solution to support the ubiquitous broadband services by low transmission power. However, multihop networking suffers from the scalability issue as coverage and users increase, since throughput enhancement and coverage extension are two contradictory goals in the multihop WMNs. Specifically, the multihop communications can indeed extend the coverage area to lower the total infrastructure cost. However, as the number of hops increases, the repeatedly relayed traffic will exhaust the radio resource. The throughput will also sharply degrade due to more collisions from a large number of users. This chapter addresses this key challenge of the WMNs from the network architecture perspective, aiming at maintaining the throughput while extending the coverage area.
