Adaptive Medium Access Control for Hybrid Wireless Mesh Networks

This paper presents the dynamic integrated-services MAC (DIS-MAC) protocol designed to enable service differentiation in CDMA-based hybrid wireless mesh networks (WMNs) through an integrated medium access that allows both contention-based and contention-free scheduled access modes. DIS-MAC utilizes dynamic capacity partitioning that adjusts CDMA capacity limits assigned to the two access modes in response to changes in network traffic loading. The contention-based access is made compatible with the IEEE 802.11 standard, while the contention-free scheduled access provides differentiated delay guarantees for real-time traffic over single-hops connecting among mesh routers, clients and gateways. The scheduler enables feedback-enhanced delay target-tracking and delay-bandwidth decoupling. Numerical results show that DIS-MAC provides high resource utilizations and differentiated delay bounds in a WMN environment characterized with heterogeneous real-time and non-real-time traffic sources.