MAC Protocol For Wireless Mesh Network Utilizing Multi-Antenna

In recent years, as more and more deployment of large-scale wireless networks, Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) has attracted more and more people’s attention, especially the emergence of broadband wireless Mesh networks greatly meet the needs of the community. As a new network architecture, it is becoming a hot research spot of next-generation wireless access network. However, it is found there are some problems hindering large-scale wireless Mesh network deployment in practical application, especially in multi-hop aspect. These problems result in bandwidth decreasing, wireless interference, network latency and so on, thus make Broadband Wireless Mesh Networks’ performance degrade.Since the goal of the wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is all the terminal nodes can access the external network ultimately, so when all the nodes generate packets towards the node which connects to an external network, due to limitation of frequency resources, bandwidth constrained, congestion will arise. When the volume of data further increase, the bottleneck effect of the network will be more evident, resulting in conflict increasing, packet loss rate rising, network throughput rapidly declining.In order to solve the problem of network performance declining which result from data stream concentrating, we studied the multi-antenna wireless Mesh networks, the benefit of deploying multi-antenna is the ability to send and receive multi data packets in parallel, thereby greatly improve network throughput. To enable the wireless Mesh network taking full usage of multiple input multiple output (MIMO) technology, and also because of WLAN’s MAC layer protocol itself is not designed for multi-hop communications, thus the performance of current 802.11x protocol under this network, how to improve, or how to design an efficient MAC layer protocol to improve network performance have became a key issue in this research.。In this article, we analyzes the previous work about MAC layer protocol under Wireless Mesh Networks, discusses the exist disadvantages of these protocol. After that, we proposed a MAC protocol which is based on independent data channel and control channel. It can support MIMO link well under Wireless Mesh Network, and can greatly take the advantages of spatial reuse with MIMO link. Thus, it can greatly enhance the network throughput, and decrease the network delay.