Receiver Sense Multiple Access Protocol for Wireless Mesh Access Networks

In wireless mesh access networks, ad hoc and infrastructure modes are both used to support multi-hop data transmission from mesh clients to a mesh router. Traffic will accumulate along the paths towards the mesh router. So the mesh clients close to the router will have more data to transmit and these packets are more likely to collide with each other. In this paper, a contention-based medium access control (MAC) protocol, called receiver sense multiple access (RSMA), is proposed for the last-hop client-to-router communications. RSMA can minimize control packet collisions and achieve collision-free data packet transmissions. A rigorous mathematical model is developed for performance analysis in a scenario with hidden terminals. Our analytical results of throughput and delay performance are verified by computer simulations.