Summary
International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation
2008
Session Number:3D07
Session:
Number:3D07-4
Characterizing Medium Access Control (MAC) Layer in Multi-hop Wireless Mesh Network
V.R Gannapathy, M.S.Zakaria, M.Muhammad, N.M Salleh, M.K Suaidi, M.S Johal, M.Z.A Abdul Aziz, M.R Ahmad,
pp.-
Publication Date:2008/10/27
Online ISSN:2188-5079
Summary:
The wireless mesh network (WMNs) has been an emerging technology in recent years. WMN is characterized by dynamic self-organization, self configuration and self healing to enable quick deployment, easy maintenance, low cost, high scalability and reliable service as well as enhancing network capacity, connectivity and resilience. Some of these characteristic are depend on MAC protocol. This is because in WMNs the MAC layer concerns with more than one hop communication (Multi-hop). Multi-hop communication is common in WMNs. For multi-hop networking, it is well known that communication protocols suffer from scalability issues; when the size of the network increases, the network performances degrades significantly. Network self-organization is needed for MAC in WMNs because it should have the knowledge about network topology which can help better cooperative between neighboring nodes. This network selforganization can significantly improve the MAC performance in a multi-hop environment. Other than these issues, because of their dynamic characteristic, there is difficulty to design the MAC protocol for WMNs. The current MAC protocol and its derivatives cannot achieve a reasonable throughput as the number of hops increases in WMNs. So, this paper will focus on medium access control layers design of wireless mesh network protocol which was proposed by the researcher in order to improve end-to-end throughput and highlights key challenges that need to be addressed in the design of a cutthrough MAC for multi-hop wireless mesh networks.