A multi-channel MAC using no dedicated control channels for wireless mesh networks

Provisioning of high throughput in wireless mesh networks (WMNs) is a challenging issue for medium access control (MAC) protocol. This is due to not only some difficult problems present in such networks such as the hidden and exposed terminal problems but also the fact that a WMN is often used as a backbone network requiring more reliable and efficient performance. Note that multi-channel based MAC protocols were proposed in the literature to handle the hidden and exposed terminal problems in multi-hop wireless ad hoc networks. Here this approach is advocated for WMNs since many literature studies show that it can much outperform the singlechannel based MAC protocols but at the expense of increased implementation complexity, which however should be acceptable in backbone WMNs. However, most existing multi-channel based MAC protocols use dedicated control channels (DCC). DCCs not only causes channel wastage but also may become a performance bottlenecks, both of which are undesirable for WMNs. In this paper, we discuss a new MAC scheme which does not use any DCCs and only requires one transceiver per node for the implementation. The simulation studies show that this scheme can outperform the one using DCCs especially in the case of heavy traffic loads.