Why does adding each new node result in ~50% bandwidth reduction, even when stations are in close proximity?

General
1

I’m experiencing significant bandwidth degradation with each additional node in my HaLoW mesh network. Even when stations are physically close to each other, I’m seeing approximately 50% bandwidth loss per hop. What could be causing this severe performance impact?

2

Hi @olympus-yoave

This is due to the half-duplex and shared medium nature of Wi-Fi. The device can not receive and transmit at the same time, and only one device may transmit on the medium at the time as all mesh nodes are in the same channel.

Therefore if say you have a network with nodes A, B, C connected as below

A ←–> B ←–> C

And A is talking to C by hopping through B, then B must receive from A, then transmit the packet to C. It is not possible for A to keep transmitting while B is transmitting the packet to C. Therefore you’ll roughly halve the available bandwidth when you add a hop.

1 Like
3

Thanks for explaining the half-duplex bandwidth issue. Quick follow-up: In my A ←→ B ←→ C setup, node A only sends small requests while node C sends all the data back. Since traffic is heavily asymmetric (mostly C→A), can I prioritize the downstream direction to get better performance? Are there any QoS settings or traffic prioritization options available for this scenario?

Thanks again!