A New Multi-channel MAC Protocol for 802.11-based Wireless Mesh Networks

Dedicated control channel protocol is a kind of classic multi-channel MAC (Medium Access Control) protocol, in which a common channel is used as a control channel to negotiate, and the remaining channels are used for data exchange. However, a large number of overhead produced in channel consultation easily leads to control channel saturation problem, which reduces both the network throughput and channel utilization. In this paper, we propose a new multiple radio MAC protocol named Enhanced Dedicated Control Channel (EDCC) protocol. A strategy named TXOP (Transmission Opportunity) is used to solve this problem for WMNs. Several continuous data frames don´t need to negotiate channel and are transmitted on the same channel which was selected before. This scheme can drastically reduce the overhead for consultation on the control channel and make the common control channel become not as busy as before. Simulation results show that EDCC improves the throughput of each data channel through reducing consultation overhead and makes the control channel be able to support negotiation for more data channels. As a result, system performance is improved.