Single Radio Mesh
In a single radio mesh, each wireless mesh node acts as an access point that supports local clients and also forwards traffic wirelessly to other nodes in the Muni WiFi mesh network. The same radio is used for access and wireless backhaul.
This approach requires that almost every packet generated by local clients must be repeated on the same channel in order to send it to at least one neighboring node in the Muni WiFi mesh. The packet is then forwarded to another node in the wireless mesh and ultimately to a node that is connected to a wired network.
This packet forwarding generates a lot of traffic. As you add more wireless mesh APs, a higher percentage of the wireless traffic in any cell is dedicated to forwarding. Very little of the channel capacity is actually available to support users.
Also, in a single radio mesh architecture all clients and mesh nodes must operate on the same channel. As a result, the entire mesh ends up acting like a single, giant access point; all of the mesh nodes and all of the clients must contend for a single channel.
For this reason, single radio wireless mesh architectures alone don't scale well to address increasing user and capacity demands on the Muni Wi-Fi network. As you add more mesh nodes, the system capacity gets worse.
Single radio mesh nodes offer a low cost entry point for data coverage and should be used in conjunction with dual- and multi-radio mesh nodes to address increasing user and capacity requirements or to support high-demand applications such as voice and video.
