Creating a high speed mesh by using dual radio nodes

During an early demonstration of MESHdesk the first question that was asked: Does it supports dual radio nodes?.
The answer at that time was not yet, perhaps in the future….
Fast forward to today and we are proud to say that MESHdesk does indeed also support dual radio nodes.

The limitations of single radio nodes

Unfortunately with a mesh there is a performance knock with each hop away from the gateway node.
This performance knock is unavoidable even with dual radio nodes.
With single radio nodes there are however also the following to consider.
When you use single radio mesh nodes each node has two functions:
- It has an ad-hoc connection with neighbor nodes. (This can be seen as the connecting wire between the nodes)
- It typically also has one or more SSIDs to which clients can connect.
This means that each radio has to time share between these two functions.
Add to the mix that the mesh and SSID's are all on the same channel and it does not take a genius to see why people will ask Does this system supports dual radio nodes

When we have dual radio nodes we can create a mesh in the following way.
Use the 5G radio for the ad-hoc connection with the neighbor nodes.
Use the 2.4G radio for the SSIDs to which clients will connect.
Make sure each node's 2.4G radio is on a non-overlapping channel (1,6,11) to reduce interference.
Test shown that this configuration results in an increase of the throughput of nearly 3 times when compared to a mesh that consist of single radio nodes.
See the following diagram for an overview.