Study on multi-channel deterministic access for wireless mesh LAN

IEEE802.11s draft proposes a new medium access control function-mesh deterministic access (MDA), which is mainly used for single-channel wireless mesh local area network (LAN). To provide high performance and network capacity for wireless mesh LAN, this paper develops an algorithm for MDA to work well on multi-channel wireless mesh LAN. To completely avoid the collisions between control packets and data packets, the interval of the meshed delivery traffic indication message is first divided into contention period and data transmission period. We define a neighbor MP status table for MPs to support multi-channel environment. The mechanism for reserving MDA opportunity (MDAOP) uses the four-way-handshaking mode to reduce hidden node problem. We propose a multi-channel MDA (MMDA) algorithm to improve the overall performance of wireless mesh LAN in multi-channel environment.