IEEE 802.11s Mesh Backbone for Vehicular Communication: Fairness and Throughput

Providing ubiquitous connectivity inside a mobile vehicle is a challenging task that requires efficient vehicle-to-infrastructure communication. A wireless mesh network (WMN) provides a cost-effective and easily maintainable solution to manage the backhaul of vehicular communication. The mesh points (MPs) act as access points for mobile vehicles and connect them to the Internet through multihop mesh communication. IEEE 802.11s is the recent standard for a WMN, which provides mesh coordinated function controlled channel access (MCCA) for efficient and minimum-contention channel access at MPs. However, the standard MCCA-based communication provides equal-time fair channel access, which is not suitable for vehicular communication. This paper proposes an efficient channel access mechanism based on IEEE 802.11s MCCA to provide proportionally fair channel access. A distributed scheme is proposed to calculate traffic load at every MP, and based on the traffic load, the MCCA is tuned to meet the required proportionality constraint. The efficiency of the proposed scheme is confirmed using theoretical analysis and simulation results.