MAC Layer Channel Access and Forwarding in a Directional Multi-Interface Mesh Network

Current deployment of wireless community networks and wireless municipal services utilizes multi-hop backbone mesh network technology to provide ubiquitous Internet connectivity to the end users. IEEE 802.11s Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is a promising technology to increase spatial reuse in a mesh backbone using high gain directional antennas. Uses of directional communication in a multi-interface mesh network introduce the problem of unbalanced traffic allocation among the end-to-end flows that results in inefficient channel access using the standard EDCA mechanism. Furthermore, the forwarding protocol should coordinate with the channel access to improve the network performance. In this paper, a localized distributed mechanism is proposed to share the channel bandwidth effectively among interfering interfaces based on the solution of the balanced traffic allocation problem. The standard forwarding algorithm is augmented to use the channel access information effectively in a dynamic network scenario. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated through the results obtained from a practical indoor IEEE 802.11n+s directional multi-interface mesh testbed.