Future channel reservation medium access control (FCR-MAC) protocol for multi-radio multi-channel wireless mesh networks

ABSTRACT

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have emerged as a new trend in wireless technology due to their low costs, ease of deployment, and wide coverage capabilities. The capacity of multi-hop WMNs can be expanded by using multiple radios each with multiple channels on each mesh router. However, using multi-radio multi-channel routers creates the so-called deafness and multi-channel hidden terminal problems. To address these problems a novel MAC protocol called Future Channel Reservation MAC (FCR-MAC) protocol is introduced in this paper. In our protocol, each node uses one common control channel and multiple data channels. Moreover, an on-demand channel allocation scheme is utilized which enables the nodes to reserve certain data channels in advance when all of them are occupied. Extensive simulations confirm that compared to other existing MAC solutions, our proposed FCR-MAC protocol achieves a very high data channel utilization, reduces the end-to-end delay and increases the system goodput significantly over several topologies and under different network workloads. Moreover, the FCR-MAC has the ability (i) to provide effective channel access differentiation among different traffic classes with different quality-of-service (QoS) requirements and (ii) to support multi-hop communication over multi-hop topologies by enabling channel reservation beyond the single-hop.

REFERENCES

• 1: IEEE 802.11 WG, IEEE Std. 802.11, 1999 ed, Part II: Wireless LAN MAC and PHY layer specs. 1999.
• 2: Network Simulator (NS), www.isi.edu/nsnam/ns.
• 3: Ian F. Akyildiz , Xudong Wang , Weilin Wang, Wireless mesh networks: a survey, Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, v.47 n.4, p.445-487, 15 March 2005 [doi>10.1016/j.comnet.2004.12.001]
• 4: Paramvir Bahl , Ranveer Chandra , John Dunagan, SSCH: slotted seeded channel hopping for capacity improvement in IEEE 802.11 ad-hoc wireless networks, Proceedings of the 10th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking, September 26-October 01, 2004, Philadelphia, PA, USA [doi>10.1145/1023720.1023742]
• 5: A. K. Das, S. Roy, and R. Vijaykumar. Static channel assignment in multi-radio multi-channel 802.11 wireless mesh networks: Issues, metrics and algorithms. In Proc. of IEEE Globecom 2006, 2006.
• 6: M. Gong, S. Mao, S. Midkiff, and B. Hart. Medium access control in wireless mesh networks. In Wireless Mesh Networking, volume 1, pages 147--182. Auerbach Publications, 2007.
• 7: Pradeep Kyasanur , Nitin H. Vaidya, Capacity of multi-channel wireless networks: impact of number of channels and interfaces, Proceedings of the 11th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking, August 28-September 02, 2005, Cologne, Germany [doi>10.1145/1080829.1080835]
• 8: C. Y. Li, A. K. Jeng, and R. H. Jan. A medium access control protocol for multi-channel multi-interface wireless mesh network. In Proc. of WASN 2006, pages 357--364, 2006.
• 9: Jeonghoon Mo , Hoi-Sheung Wilson So , Jean Walrand, Comparison of multi-channel MAC protocols, Proceedings of the 8th ACM international symposium on Modeling, analysis and simulation of wireless and mobile systems, October 10-13, 2005, Montréal, Quebec, Canada [doi>10.1145/1089444.1089480]
• 10: J. S. Pathmasuntharam, A. Das, and A. K. Gupta. Primary channel assignment based mac (pcam) - a multi-channel mac protocol for multi-hop wireless networks. In Proc. of IEEE WCNC 2004, volume 2, pages 1110--1115, 2004.
• 11: Pradeep Kyasanur , Nitin H. Vaidya, Routing and link-layer protocols for multi-channel multi-interface ad hoc wireless networks, ACM SIGMOBILE Mobile Computing and Communications Review, v.10 n.1, p.31-43, January 2006 [doi>10.1145/1119759.1119762]
• 12: Jungmin So , Nitin H. Vaidya, Multi-channel mac for ad hoc networks: handling multi-channel hidden terminals using a single transceiver, Proceedings of the 5th ACM international symposium on Mobile ad hoc networking and computing, May 24-26, 2004, Roppongi Hills, Tokyo, Japan [doi>10.1145/989459.989487]
• 13: A. Tyamaloukas and J. J. Garcia-Luna-Aceves. Channel-hopping multiple access. In Proc. of ICC '00, pages 415--419, 2000.
• 14: A. Tzamaloukas and J.J. Garcia-Luna-Aceves. Channel hopping multiple access with packet trains for ad hoc networks. In Proc. of IEEE MoMuC 2000, 2000.
• 15: S.-L. Wu , C.-Y Lin , Y.-C. Tseng , J.-P. Sheu, A New Multi-Channel MAC Protocol with On-Demand Channel Assignment for Multi-Hop Mobile Ad Hoc Networks, Proceedings of the 2000 International Symposium on Parallel Architectures, Algorithms and Networks (ISPAN '00), p.232, December 07-07, 2000
• 16: S.-L. Wu, C.-Y Lin, Y.-C. Tseng, and J.-P. Sheu. A multi-channel mac protocol with power control for multi-hop mobile ad hoc networks. The Computer Journal, 45(1):101--110, 2002.
• 17: Shugong Xu , Tarek Saadawi, Revealing the problems with 802.11 medium access control protocol in multi-hop wireless ad hoc networks, Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking, v.38 n.4, p.531-548, 15 March 2002 [doi>10.1016/S1389-1286(01)00273-0]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.1 Network Architecture and Design
          Subjects: Wireless communication

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Performance

Keywords:
medium access control, multi-radio technology, performance evaluation, wireless mesh networks