A New Synchronized Multi-interface MAC Protocol for Multi-hop Wireless Mesh Networks

Multichannel MAC protocol (MMAC) was proposed by So et al. It divides time into beacon periods and consists of an announcement traffic information message (ATIM) phase and a data phase (So et al. Proceedings of 5th ACM international symposium on Mobile ad hoc networking and computing(Mobihoc’04),2006). Nodes negotiate during the ATIM phase on a common channel and transmit data in data phase on multiple channels. But one negotiation window in each beacon period limits the networks performance in multi-hop scenario which plays the main role in Wireless mesh networks (WMNs). In this chapter, researchers propose Synchronized Multi-Interface MAC protocol (SMIMAC), in which the ATIM phase is divided into multiple short windows. And each of them is followed by a short data window. Without increasing the sum of negotiations time, multiple but short consultation windows can provide negotiation opportunities for those nodes which fail to consult before and those nodes which are away from the sender when they have packets to transmit. The simulation results show that the scheme achieves seven time higher aggregate network throughput and average packet delay reduced to 32 % of MMAC in multi-hop scenario.