Medium access control for inter-gateway handoff support in multi-hop wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged to be a key wireless technology to support large-scale wireless Internet access. Seamless inter-gateway handoff support is an essential issue to ensure continuous communications in multi-hop WMNs. When the movement of a mobile mesh node (MN) causes its attachment point change in the Internet, the complete handoff process may include two steps: the link-layer handoff and the network-layer handoff. During the network-layer handoff, network- layer signaling packets need to be transmitted between the MN and the Internet via the multi-hop wireless mesh backbone. Due to the multi-hop transmission of network- layer handoff signaling packets, the handoff performance in WMNs can be largely degraded by the long queueing delay and medium access delay at each mesh router, especially when the backbone traffic volume is high. However, this critical issue is ignored in existing handoff solutions of multi-hop WMNs. In addition, the channel contention between data packets and handoff signaling packets is not considered in existing medium access control (MAC) designs. In this research, the seamless handoff support is addressed from a different perspec- tive. By eliminating channel contentions between data and handoff signaling pack- ets, the queueing delay and channel access delay of signaling packets are reduced, while data throughput is maintained. Since various WMNs have different channel resources and hardware cost requirements, four MAC schemes are proposed to im- prove the multi-hop handoff performance in single-channel single-radio, single-channel multi-radio, multi-channel single-radio, and multi-channel multi-radio WMNs. With the proposed MAC schemes, the inter-gateway handoff performance can be improved significantly in multi-hop WMNs

A Survey of Medium Access Mechanisms for Providing QoS in Ad-Hoc Networks

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Medium Access Control Protocols for Ad-Hoc Wireless Networks: A Survey

Studies of ad hoc wireless networks are a relatively new field gaining more popularity for various new applications. In these networks, the Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols are responsible for coordinating the access from active nodes. These protocols are of significant importance since the wireless communication channel is inherently prone to errors and unique problems such as the hidden-terminal problem, the exposed-terminal problem, and signal fading effects. Although a lot of research has been conducted on MAC protocols, the various issues involved have mostly been presented in isolation of each other. We therefore make an attempt to present a comprehensive survey of major schemes, integrating various related issues and challenges with a view to providing a big-picture outlook to this vast area. We present a classification of MAC protocols and their brief description, based on their operating principles and underlying features. In conclusion, we present a brief summary of key ideas and a general direction for future work

AMNP: ad hoc multichannel negotiation protocol for multihop mobile wireless networks

Abstract — Increasing the capacity of wireless communication is an important and urgent research area, which has attracted more attentions. One of potential solutions is to divide the radio spectrum into several independent radio channels, which can be operated and accessed by all nodes within their radio transmission range simultaneously. Many solutions adopt mul-tiple transceivers to fulfill this goal. However, these solutions are short in implementation and may increase the prime cost of the device since most wireless devices only equip one single transceiver. Moreover, with a few exceptions, most researchers have emphasized centralized resource allocation algorithms for cellular systems where the base station keeps track of the requirements of the various users and is thus responsible for the management of network resources. Nevertheless, on the other hand, a multihop mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is generally configured as peer-to-peer networks with no centralized hubs or controllers to coordinate channel allocations. Therefore, in this paper, we proposed a multichannel medium access control (MAC) protocol, named ad hoc multichannel negotiation protocol (AMNP), for multichannel transmission by using the distributed fashion. We address the issue of distributed resource allocation for multihop MANETs by presenting an AMNP that builds on the multichannel request-to-send/clear-to-send (MRTS/MCTS) bandwidth reservation mechanism under the constraint of a single transceiver. Besides, to conquer the problem of broadcast transmissions in multichannel environment under the constrain of one single transceiver, we further design a broadcast announce-ment scheme for AMNP. Moreover, an enhancement version of AMNP called AMNP with channel scheduling (AMNP/s) is also introduced to improve the channel utilization. We show via simulations that AMNP/s provides a higher throughput compared to its single channel counterpart by promoting simultaneous transmissions in different channels. Simulation results also show that the proposed AMNP/s derives higher performance than other multichannel transmission schemes, which equip multiple transceivers

Can Multiple Subchannels Improve the Delay Performance of RTS/CTS-based MAC Schemes?

We analyze the delay performance of RTS/CTSbased (Request-To-Send/Clear-To-Send) multi-channel MAC (Medium Access Control) schemes for wireless networks. These schemes usually employ multiple data subchannels for data transmission and one control subchannel to send the RTS/CTS dialogue for channel reservation. Through theoretical analysis and simulations, we show that, in fully-connected networks, such multi-channel MAC schemes suffer longer delays than the corresponding single channel MAC scheme, that puts the RTS/CTS dialogue on the same channel as data packet transmissions. This conclusion holds even when data packets have different priorities and higher priority traffic is sent ahead of lower priority traffic