2017 Volume E100.A Issue 11 Pages 2425-2438
In this paper, we study Wi-Fi mesh networks (WMNs) as a promising candidate for wireless networking infrastructure that interconnects a variety of access networks. The main performance bottleneck of a WMN is their limited capacity due to the packet collision from the contention-based IEEE 802.11s MAC. To mitigate this problem, we present the distributed link-activation (DLA) protocol which activates a set of collision-free links for a fixed amount of time by exchanging a few control packets between neighboring MRs. Through the rigorous proof, it is shown that the upper bound of the DLA rounds is O(Smax), where Smax is the maximum number of (simultaneous) interference-free links in a WMN topology. Based on the DLA, we also design the distributed throughput-maximal scheduling (D-TMS) scheme which overlays the DLA protocol on a new frame architecture based on the IEEE 802.11 power saving mode. To mitigate its high latency, we propose the D-TMS adaptive data-period control (D-TMS-ADPC) that adjusts the data period depending on the traffic load of a WMN. Numerical results show that the D-TMS-ADPC scheme achieves much higher throughput performance than the IEEE 802.11s MAC.
