Time division based multi-radio multi-channel MAC protocol for wireless mesh networks

The capacity problem in wireless mesh networks can be alleviated by equipping the mesh nodes with multiple radios tuned to orthogonal channels. Most of previous researches focus on the allocation of multiple channels for data transmission using single common control channel. The increasing number of nodes and traffic flows, however, will result in the bottleneck in the single common control channel and degrades system performance. To solve the problem, this paper presents a time division multi-radio multi-channel MAC protocol with multiple control channels, which intelligently allocates all available channels for both control channels and data transmission channels in a time division method through a two stage coordination: control channel allocation in a centralized way and dynamical data channel allocation in a distributed way. We demonstrate the proposed protocol through ns2 simulator with different number of orthogonal channels. The results show that the proposed protocol can improve the throughput and decrease the end-to-end delay at the same time over other conventional schemes.