An Efficient MAC Protocol for Multi-Rate Aware Wireless Mesh Networks

The multi-rate capability of emerging radio interfaces such as IEEE 802.11a/b/g has provided the wireless network with vast capacity. Recently, rate adaptation protocols have been developed that dynamically select the data rate according to the channel condition. Furthermore, several ad hoc routing protocols have been proposed that adapt to the multi-rate environment. These multi-rate aware routing protocols tend to select high data rate links which are shorter in distance compared to low data rate links. In this paper we propose an efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol for multi-rate aware wireless mesh networks. The protocol utilizes the fact that the multi-rate aware routing protocols use short-distance links and it attempts to reserve two hops with a single request- to-send (RTS) frame. We show that our proposed protocol enhances the network throughput compared to legacy IEEE 802.11 via simulation.