Promoting fluidity in the flow of packets of 802.11 wireless mesh networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are based on packet forwarding and therefore require efficient multi-hop protocols for their deployment. Toward this objective, we study the flow of packets through the network and using an analogy with fluid physics we classify them as being either laminar in the case of a smooth propagation or turbulent otherwise. Following this terminology, we present the tendency of current 802.11 to generate turbulent flows, i.e. to queue packets at the intermediate nodes for a non-deterministic time. However numerous applications such as VoIP, TCP and streaming are very delay sensitive and therefore laminar behavior is desirable. We model existing 802.11 multi-hop networks and identify the exponential backoff policy as a main parameter in the transition between laminar and turbulent behavior.