New Aspect of Beaconing in IEEE 802.11s Mesh Networks

In the legacy IEEE 802.11 ad hoc networks, beacons are commonly used to exchange timing information between stations, to maintain clock synchronization. To serve this purpose, the only beacon is enough, while multiple beacons are prohibited, during a beacon transmission window. With the appearance of 11s Amendment specifying mesh networking, beacons take the responsibility to support a novel Mesh Deterministic Access (MDA) method improving QoS for multimedia delay-sensitive traffic. Beacons of different stations become more individual now, and the current 11s beaconing scheme inherited from that in IEEE 802.11 ad hoc networks doesn´t meet MDA requirements. This paper investigates more efficient beaconing scheme permitting multiple beacons in a beacon period. We develop a simple analytical model which estimates the beaconing scheme efficiency and allows tuning the scheme to improve the MDA support.