serving 4,000 users. Such dense mesh deployments have high levels of interaction across
heterogeneous wireless links. We find that this heterogeneous backhaul consisting of data-
carrying (forwarding) links and non-data-carrying (non-forwarding) links creates two key
effects on performance. First, we show that low-rate management and control packets can
produce a disproportionally large degradation in data throughput. We define a metric for this …