This is a copy of the author 's final draft version of an article published in the journal Soft computing. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00500-015-1663-z

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are attracting a lot of attention from wireless network researchers. Node placement problems have been investigated for a long time in the optimization field due to numerous applications in location science. In our previous work, we evaluated WMN-GA system which is based on genetic algorithms (GAs) to find an optimal location assignment for mesh routers. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of four different distributions of mesh clients for two WMN architectures considering throughput, delay and energy metrics. For simulations, we used ns-3, optimized link state routing (OLSR) and hybrid wireless mesh protocols (HWMP). We compare the performance for Normal, Uniform, Exponential and Weibull distributions of mesh clients by sending multiple constant bit rate flows in the network. The simulation results show that for HWM protocol the throughput of Uniform distribution is higher than other distributions. However, for OLSR protocol, the throughput of Exponential distribution is better than other distributions. For both protocols, the delay and remaining energy are better for Weibull distribution.

Peer Reviewed