Research On Multi-Channel Protocol For Mesh Network

Mesh network is "wireless mesh network", which is a wireless multi-hop networks. It is evolved from ad hoc network, as the key technologies, to solve the "last mile" problem. In the process of evolution to the next-generation networks, wireless is an essential technology. Wireless mesh network can coordinate with other networks to communicate, and it is a dynamic network architecture that can scale, in which any two devices keep the wireless connection. Currently, the research on wireless Mesh network is very popular in the world. Channel resource allocation and management plays a very important role in wireless Mesh network performance optimization. Therefore, multi-channel wireless Mesh networks protocols have been widely studied.Through analysis on the concept, structure, and development of the Wireless Mesh Network, multi-channel protocol will be the research focus. First, this article introduces the existing single-channel protocol IEEE 802.11 DCF, and then describes the detail of the multi-channel protocol DCA, MMAC and PCAM, and at last, we propose the improved multi-interface multi-channel mechanism based on Rammon platform and the enhanced multi-channel protocol. Simulation results show that our protocol can increase the network throughput and reduce the packet delay.Finally, we study the throughput and fairness issues of the multi-channel Mesh network and use a new cross-layer algorithm--the joint rate control, routing and scheduling. The LP and the CP are used to solve the maximum throughput problem. Simulation results show that the algorithm can achieve a good tradeoff between fairness and throughput.