The Mesh Airtime Collapse
Smartwave Tech / Municipal Deployment
Situation
A 15-drone mesh network collapsed to less than 2 Mbps per node during a dense urban deployment. The mesh was designed for city-wide coverage but became unusable when all nodes were active simultaneously — a classic airtime fairness problem that gets exponentially worse with node count.
Task
Fix the mesh throughput collapse and make the architecture scalable beyond 15 nodes for the city contract requirements.
Action
I implemented a two-pronged approach: airtime fairness algorithms that prevented any single node from monopolizing the shared medium, combined with TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) scheduling that gave each node guaranteed transmission windows. This hybrid approach maintained the flexibility of CSMA/CA for bursty traffic while providing deterministic scheduling for sustained flows.
Result
Successfully scaled the mesh to 25 drones with consistent throughput per node. The airtime fairness + TDMA hybrid approach was novel enough that we filed a patent. The city contract was renewed and expanded to additional coverage areas.