Study on multi-channel mesh deterministic access for wireless mesh LAN

IEEE802.11s draft proposes a new medium access control (MAC) function-mesh deterministic access (MDA), which is mainly used for single-channel wireless mesh local area network (LAN). In single-channel environment, collisions between control packets and data packets may occur very often. In order to provide higher performance and network capacity for wireless mesh LAN, this article develops an algorithm for MDA to work well on multi-channel wireless mesh LAN. To reduce the hardware requirements in design, a mesh point (MP) only equips single transceiver to support multi-channel environment. To completely avoid the collision between control packets and data packets, the interval of the meshed delivery traffic indication message is first divided into contention period and data transmission period. We newly define a neighbor MP status table for MPs to support multi-channel environment. The mechanism of reserving MDA opportunity (MDAOP) adopts the four-way-handshaking mode to reduce hidden node problem; we propose channel load first random fit and multi-channel best fit mechanisms to select MDAOP. We also propose a multi-channel MDA (MMDA) algorithm to improve the overall performance of wireless mesh LAN in multi-channel environment. The theoretical analysis gives the upper limit of the throughput for MMDA. The simulation experiments clearly show the results in multi-channel wireless mesh LAN environment that MMDA performs better than the enhanced distributed channel access in throughput, average waiting time, and packet drop ratio both in the saturated and non-saturated mode.