Scheduled Mesh Access Mechanism for an IEEE 802.11 Mesh Network

One of the key issues for an IEEE 802.11-based mesh network is the effectiveness of its distributed listen-before-transmit media access control approach. In this paper we proposed one technique, called scheduled mesh access (SMA), for reducing the impact of interference on a mesh network. The SMA mechanism reserves time on the media for future transmissions, and then accesses the media at reserved times using the 802.11 channel access procedures. We study the ability of mesh network employing SMA to avoid non-mesh interference and schedule around self interference. Results indicate that SMA is more robust to interference than the enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) function (defined by in the IEEE 802.1 le amendment to the IEEE 802.11 standard), which does not includes a mesh-aware scheduling mechanism.