Performance Evaluation for Minislot Allocation for Wireless Mesh Networks

The IEEE 802.16 Standard defines the mesh mode for media access control for external and internal packet transmission. In the IEEE 802.16 mesh mode, the allocation of minislots is handled by centralized scheduling and distributed scheduling, which are independently exercised. This paper proposes the Combined Distributed and Centralized (CDC) and Combined Distributed and Centralized with Queue capability (CDCQ) schemes to combine distributed scheduling and centralized scheduling so that the minislot allocation can be more flexible and the utilization is increased. Two scheduling algorithms, i.e., the Round-Robin (RR) and Greedy algorithms, are used as the baseline algorithms for centralized scheduling. This paper proposes an analytical model and conducts simulation experiments to investigate the performance of the CDC-series schemes with the RR and Greedy algorithms in terms of the acceptance rate of both external and internal packet data. Our study indicates that the CDC-series schemes outperform the scheme proposed in the IEEE standard.