This interests me, but I can't find a paper - stuff like "mesh network bandwidth...

wmf · on Nov 24, 2011

Jinyang Li, Charles Blake, Douglas S. J. De Couto, Hu Imm Lee, and Robert Morris: Capacity of Ad Hoc Wireless Networks. Mobicom 2001. http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/grid:mobicom01/

Summary: Throughput of a mesh asymptotically approaches 1/7th of the non-mesh link rate. This is using the 802.11 MAC, but recent softMAC chipsets could be run in a more mesh-optimized psuedo-802.11 protocol (that has not been invented yet AFIAK), so you might get performance as good as 1/4th.

marshray · on Nov 24, 2011

1/7 or 1/4 is a lot better than k/n^2.

Wohlf · on Nov 24, 2011

I think this may be because no one has attempted it on a scale where it is essentially cripplingly slow.