A Fully Cooperative and Distributed Medium Access Control Protocol for Large TDMA/TDD-Based Wireless Mesh Networks

A medium access control (MAC) protocol is developed for time division multiple access (TDMA) and time division duplex (TDD)-based large wireless mesh networks (WMNs) with infrastructure support. Utilizing control time slots, the protocol operates in a fully cooperative and distributed manner: mesh routers cooperate to negotiate resource allocation, and the messages are exchanged only among one-hop neighbors. Data time slots are dynamically distributed among mesh routers adapting to the varying network conditions. A large high-fidelity and time-driven simulator is created which implements realistic radio propagation models and interference as well as capturing the stochastic network behavior due to random traffic arrivals and queueing. A novel parallel processing technique is employed to reduce the long runtimes. Through simulations, protocol performance is determined for different resource allocation schemes including data time slot selection policies and routing strategies. Results show that the effects of different resource allocation schemes on the network performance greatly vary under wide- ranging congestion levels.