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In recent years, Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) which uses a multi-hop configuration to extend the reach of the last-mile access to Internet has come into public notice. WMN improves network performance by the use of multiple orthogonal (non-overlapping) channels and multiple wireless interfaces. However, the Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol in IEEE 802.11 standard was designed and suited for only one channel and one interface. In this paper, we present a new MAC protocol which is specially designed for multi-channel and multi-interface WMNs. The proposed MAC protocol employs a hybrid channel assignment strategy to solve the rendezvous problem and a waiting time scheme for updating network allocation vectors (NAVs) to solve the multichannel hidden terminal problem. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol can achieve a better utilization of both interfaces and channels.

Keywords: wireless mesh networks, multi-channel, multi-interface, MAC protocol, channel assignment

Retrieve PDF document (200707_06.pdf)

Received September 15, 2006; accepted February 6, 2007.
Communicated by Ten H. Lai, Chung-Ta King and Jehn-Ruey Jiang.
^*This work was supported in part by the National Science Council of Taiwan, R.O.C., under grants No. NSC 95-2219-E-009-006, NSC 95-2219-E-009-008 and NSC 95-2752-E-009-005-PAE, and in part by the New Generation Broadband Wireless Communication Technologies and Applications project of Institute for Information Industry, MOEA of the R.O.C.