TMAC: Timestamp-ordered MAC for CSMA/CA Wireless Mesh Networks

CSMA/CA by scheduling data packets based on their age. Prior to transmitting a data packet, a transmitter broadcasts a request control message appended with a timestamp to a selected list of neighbors. It can proceed with the transmission only if it receives a sufficient number of grant control messages from these neighbors. A grant message indicates that the associated data packet has the lowest timestamp of all the packets pending transmission at the local transmit queue. We demonstrate that a loose ordering of timestamps among neighboring nodes is sufficient for enforcing local fairness, subsequently leading to flow rate fairness in a multi-hop WMN. We show that TMAC can be implemented using the control frames in IEEE 802.11 stack, and thus can be easily integrated in existing 802.11-based WMNs. Our simulation results show that TMAC achieves excellent resource allocation fairness while maintaining over 90 % of maximum link capacity in parking lot and large grid topologies. Index Terms—Wireless Mesh Networks, 802.11, TCP, fairness I