Research on Scheduling Mechanism of Control Channel in 802.16 Mesh Mode

IEEE 802.16 is IEEE's technical standard for wireless broadband metropolitan area network, including physical layer (PHY) and media access control layer (MAC) specifications. The MAC layer supports point-to-multipoint (PMP) and Mesh modes. In the Mesh mode, time is divided into fixed-length frames, each of which is subdivided into control subframes and data sub-frames. Control subframes can be accessed through the conflict free distributed process, namely Mesh Election. This paper first introduces the MAC frame structure and scheduling mechanism in Mesh mode, and then elaborates the Mesh Election mechanism in the protocol. Finally, the performance of the Mesh Election mechanism is evaluated by simulation to determine the system configuration parameters that has the greatest impact on the transmission performance of control channel. According to the simulation results, improvement measures of the algorithm performance are analyzed.