A fast forward medium access control protocol for IEEE 802.11s mesh networks with multiple channels

This paper proposes a fast forward medium access control protocol (FFMAC) for quality-of-service (QoS) guarantee in multihop IEEE 802.11s wireless mesh networks with multiple channels. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed protocol is the first one which considers the multihop and multichannel issues simultaneously. It provides higher priority for real-time applications, while remaining the distributed coordination function (DCF) for best-effort ones. The mathematical analyses and simulation results show that FFMAC can reduce the end-to-end delay and increase throughput significantly.