A New Distributed Scheduling Scheme for Wireless Mesh Networks

In this paper we propose a new totally distributed scheduling scheme, the randomized-MAC (R-MAC), for wireless mesh networks. This mechanism is based on a function that randomly selects an available control slot. In each frame a generic node will try to reserve a new control slot. This control slot is a kind of permission to reserve new information slots and for exchanging its scheduling information with its neighbors. The scheduling process is executed across the entire network at the same time. Nodes do not wait in some particular order to schedule their transmission. This makes sure that the mechanism is fair. We implemented this new scheme in a well-known simulator, ns-2. Moreover, we implemented the coordinated distributed scheduling (CDS) scheme of the Std. IEEE 802.16 and we compared R-MAC and the standard distributed scheme. In practice, through extensive simulations we have been able to sketch some inherent characteristics of the standard scheme and we tried to develop a mechanism that permits to overcome some limits of the CDS. We will show how our mechanism outperforms CDS mechanism in terms of throughput and data packet end-to-end delay.