1 Introduction
Multi-hop wireless mesh networks (WMN) [1], [2], [3] have received increasing attractions because they can be deployed and maintained easily for extending the coverages of the wired backbone networks. Among the WMNs, the fixed network topology of chain-based wireless backhaul networks (WBNs) [4], [5], [6] have attracted the highest attention due to their linear topologies that simplify the routing mechanisms and also offer high-performance and low-cost public wireless access services. Specifically, in a chain-based WBN, the traffic is sent or received through intermediate relay nodes and then toward the gateway that is connected to the wired Internet. Essentially, the major challenge pertaining to the chain-based WBN is to design a medium access control (MAC) scheme to improve the end-to-end throughput.