Future Channel Reservation Medium Access Control (FCR-MAC) Protocol for Multi-Radio Multi-Channel Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have emerged as a new trend in wireless technology due to their low costs, ease of deployment, and wide coverage capabilities. The capacity of multi-hop WMNs can be expanded by using multiple radios each with multiple channels on each mesh router. However, using multi-radio multi-channel routers creates the so-called deafness and multi-channel hidden terminal problems. To address these problems a novel MAC protocol called Future Channel Reservation MAC (FCR-MAC) protocol is introduced in this paper. In our protocol, each node uses one common control channel and multiple data channels. Moreover, an on-demand channel allocation scheme is utilized which enables the nodes to reserve certain data channels in advance when all of them are occupied. Extensive simulations confirm that compared to other existing MAC solutions, our proposed FCR-MAC protocol achieves a very high data channel utilization, reduces the end-to-end delay and increases the system goodput significantly over several topologies and under different network workloads. Moreover, the FCR-MAC has the ability (i) to provide effective channel access differentiation among different traffic classes with different quality-of-service (QoS) requirements and (ii) to support multi-hop communication over multi-hop topologies by enabling channel reservation beyond the single-hop.