Multi-Radio Mesh
Like a dual-radio wireless mesh, a multi-radio wireless mesh also separates access and backhaul, but it goes a step further in order to provide increased capacity, reliability and scalability for the Muni Wi-Fi mesh network.
Additional radios in each mesh node are dedicated to the wireless backhaul. The backhaul mesh is no longer a shared network. It is built from multiple point-to-point wireless links and each of the backhaul links operates on different independent channels.
When used as a backhaul in this fashion, the performance of a multi-radio mesh is similar to switched wired connections between the mesh nodes.
The mesh radios operate independently on different channels so latency is very low. There are only two nodes per link, so contention is very low. In fact, it is possible to run a customized protocol on the backhaul links that optimizes throughput in this simple contention free environment.
Performance in a multi-radio mesh is much better than the dual radio or single radio mesh approaches.
The mesh delivers more capacity and scales up as the size of the Muni WiFi network is increased - as more nodes are added to the system, overall system capacity increases.
