Hybrid medium access control scheme to enhance the performance of IEEE 802.11s wireless mesh networks

Abstract

In recent years IEEE 802.11 has become the most famous protocol for implementation of wireless local area networks (WLAN). The diffusion and the increasing demand for WLAN coverage make a lot of installation of access points (APs). Although the cost of APs is lower than the cost of cellular equipment, interconnecting APs through wired links requires high cost and complexity. Therefore wireless mesh networks (WMNs) that directly interconnects APs through wireless links become a promising technology for the next-generation wireless networks. One of the important functions in WMNs is multi-hop packet forwarding between source and destination. However, in WMNs based on the IEEE 802.11 DCF, there are many collisions and retransmissions in the nearby mesh portal (MPP) which is bottleneck node of WMNs. In this paper, we propose hybrid medium access control (HMAC) scheme for WMNs and compare performance of the HMAC with that of conventional DCF in terms of throughput and delay. From the result, the HMAC yields better performance than the conventional DCF for WMNs. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.