Cooperative MAC Scheme for Multi-Hop Multi-Channel Wireless Mesh Networks

In this paper, a novel scheme cooperative MAC for multi-hop multi-radio wireless mesh networks (WMNs) is proposed to improve the performance of the IEEE 802.11s MAC draft protocol. The proposed scheme allows transmitter (cooperative source node) to request multiple intermediate nodes for cooperative transmission to receiver (cooperative target node) when the direct transmission leads to throughput degradation. These intermediate nodes work as virtual nodes (VNs). If the transmission based on two-hop cooperation can not satisfy the transmission request, the cooperative source node requests to establish three-hop or more-hop cooperative transmission. Thus, a slow one-hop transmission can be transformed into a faster two-hop or more-hop transmission and the proposed scheme utilizes multiple channels for parallel transmissions for decreasing the transmission time and increasing the throughput significantly. Both theoretical analyses and simulation experiments show the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed scheme.