A Novel Distributed Pseudo TDMA Channel Access Protocol for Multi-Transmit-Receive Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) technology has been used in recent years for broadband access in both cities and rural areas. A key development is to equip routers with multiple directional antennas so that these routers can transmit to, or receive from multiple neighbors simultaneously. The Multi-Transmit-Receive (MTR) feature can boost network capacity significantly if suitable scheduling policy is applied. In this paper, we propose a distributed link scheduler called PCP-TDMA that fully utilizes the MTR capability. In particular, it activates every link at least once within the shortest period of time. We evaluated the performance of PCP-TDMA in various network topologies, and compared it against a centralized algorithm called ALGO-2, and two distributed approaches: JazzyMAC and ROMA. The results show that PCP-TDMA achieves similar performance with the centralized algorithm in all scenarios, and outperforms the distributed approaches significantly. Specifically, in a fully connected network, the resulting superframe length of PCP-TDMA is less than 1/3 and 1/2 of JazzyMAC and ROMA, respectively.