A Medium Access Control Protocol for Multi-Channel Multi-Interface Wireless Mesh Network

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 mul-tiple 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, so we need a new MAC protocol suited for multi-channel and multi-interface in WMN. In this paper, we propose a new MAC protocol for WMN which employs a hybrid channel assignment strategy. Thus we can solve the rendezvous problem easily. In order to solve multi-channel hidden ter-minal problem, the proposed protocol employs a waiting time scheme to update network allocation vectors (NAVs). Moreover, we employ a dynamic staying period scheme and a dynamic waiting time scheme to improve the utiliza-tion of both interfaces and channels. In simulation results, the proposed protocol outperforms the previous MAC pro-tocol with hybrid channel assignment.