and thus avoid interferences in the wireless subnetwork, which results in the network throughput improvement.
In traditional WMNs, though the increase of the number of gateways can improve the network throughput, such improvement is limited by the interference in the WMN.
This is verified by Fig. 7. In Fig. 7, the number of gateways in the network is varied from 10 to 20 and each gateway has direct wireless communications with 2 wireless routers. There are 20 traffic flows in the network, each with the traffic demand 10Mbps. We can see that the network throughput in the FiWi can benefit greatly from the increased number of gateways.
However, the network throughput increase is marginal in the traditional WMN.
The network throughput remains almost the same when more than 14 gateways are deployed in the WMN.