A distributed throughput-maximal scheduling MAC protocol for Wi-Fi mesh networks

With a proliferation of IEEE 802.11 WLAN technology, Wi-Fi mesh networks (WMNs) have received a considerable attention as a promising solution to provide a cost-efficient high-bandwidth Internet access to nomadic stations, such as lap-top computers and smartphones. However, the capacity of a WMN is still limited due to the frame collisions in its contention-based MAC protocols. In this paper, we present a distributed throughput-maximal scheduling (D-TMS) MAC protocol which overlays the distributed link-activation (DLA) algorithm over the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol. The DLA algorithm activates a set of collision-free links by exchanging the control frames between neighbor mesh routers only. With an adaptive data-transmission period, the D-TMS MAC protocol attains a better throughput-delay performance for a wide range of traffic condition. The simulation results show that the D-TMS MAC protocol achieves much higher throughput than the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocols.