The theme of this thesis is to analyse the performance of a conventional mesh topology in a multipath fading environment and compare it with a newly proposed multiple cell based mesh topology. The communication performance in general is measured by the overall through-put, packets delivery reliability, average message delivery delay and power-consumption.

In this thesis, for simplicity of the calculation the network performance is indirectly measured in-terms of the number of additional routes originally required to connect an isolated or disconnected device, percentage of the devices which have reliable and unreliable route from or to the back bone routers, number of hops from back-bone routers to the nodes and redundant routes which includes the routes inside the particular cell or outside to the other cell.

In this simulation 240 nodes has been used within the area of 120 x 60 m² which is just in accordance with an average size of industry. Network simulation is broken down into five different scenarios with respect to different number of field devices or nodes and back bone routers along with the presence of obstacles in the area and then analysed respectively. Entire simulation and analytical work have been done on MATLAB.

Major applications of multiple cell based mesh topology can be used within industrial process automation, such as pulp and paper, steel, oil and gas, etc.