Edgenet 2006 – Is an Office Without Wires Feasible?

A wireless office is an office without wired Ethernet connectivity, or rather, one with the least number of machines connected by wires. What happens if we re-design the network in an office – remove all the network infrastructure (wireless APs, switches, routers, etc.), replace the Ethernet wires to every desktop and server with IEEE 802.11, and maintain a very small number of “gateway” machines for access to the wired corporate intranet and the Internet?

We evaluated the feasibility of a mesh network for an all-wireless office using traces of 11 office users spanning over a month and an actual 21-node multi-radio mesh testbed in an office area. Unlike previous mesh studies that have examined routing design in detail, we examine how different office mesh design choices impact the performance of user traffic. We find that the performance on our mesh network depends on the combination of routing metric, user-server placement, traffic load, wireless hardware and wireless settings. While clearly it is possible to overwhelm typical wireless networks, we conclude that for our traces and deployed system, all-wireless office meshes are feasible. In most cases, individual transactions incur under 20ms of additional delay over the mesh network. We believe this is an acceptable delay for most applications where a wired network to every machine is not readily available. We argue that our results are scalable to a network of over 100 users.