A collision-free MAC scheme for multimedia wireless mesh backbone

cuiyaping321

Abstract—Wireless mesh networking is a promising wireless
technology for future broadband Internet access. In this paper,
a novel collision-free medium access control (MAC) scheme
supporting multimedia applications is proposed for wireless
mesh backbone. The proposed scheme is distributed, simple,
and scalable. Benefiting from the fixed locations of wireless
routers, the proposed MAC scheme reduces the control overhead
greatly as compared with conventional contention-based MAC
schemes (e.g., IEEE 802.11). In addition, the proposed scheme
can provide guaranteed priority access to real-time trafficand,
at the same time, ensure fair channel access to the routers with
data traffic. Unlike most of the existing MAC schemes which
focus on single-hop transmissions, the proposed MAC scheme
takes the intra-flow correlations between up-stream and down-
stream hops of a multi-hop flow into consideration. To avoid
buffer overflow at bottleneck routers, a simple but effective
congestion control mechanism is proposed. Simulation results
demonstrate that the proposed scheme significantly improves
the delay performance of real-time traffic and the end-to-end
data throughput, as compared with IEEE 802.11 and distributed
packet reservation multiple access (DPRMA). The performance
analysis of the proposed scheme is also presented. The accuracy
of the analytical results is verified by computer simulations.