David Gascón – June 18, 2008
The first mesh generation used one radio to create both the backhaul data “pipe” (the path created to move information thorough the network) and the final client connection. It had several problems such as the send-receive wait cycle and the interferences derived from all the machines accessing to the spectrum in the same channel.
The first problem is located in the wireless cards since they can not receive and send information at the same fraction of time, so, an only task can be performed at the same time. The second problem is a physical one, if two or more radios emit at the same time in the same frequency the waves add and the result is a signal meaningless, which commonly we refer as noise.
In the Second Mesh Generation two different radios are used, one is dedicated to create the mesh and the other to give the service to the clients. However, in Meshlium we have wanted to far away and for this reason we have prepared the router to create two different mesh networks.
Each wifi interface comes with a high power (600mW) radio which let Meshlium to get strong and long distance links. Each card uses also a different frequency (2.4GHz and 5GHz) so we avoid the interferences problem getting on each interface the best throughput possible.
