An Efficient Algorithm for Performance Enhancement in Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) provide most effective last mile connectivity over a large newlinegeographical area with least deployment time, least deployment cost, highly reliable connectivity, newlineself-healing and self-organizing capabilities. WMNs can be utilized in various application domains newlinesuch as (a) Broadband home networking, (b) Community and neighborhood networking, (c) newlineEnterprise networking, (d) Campus wide networking, and many more. newline newlineThese varieties of WMN applications have led to many design constraints. The network performance newlinedrops significantly if the WMN routers are not properly configured for each of the applications. The newlinesize of the network may vary during the lifetime of the application usage; hence the WMNs are newlineexpected to absorb these changes internally without modifications to hardware / software / newlineconfiguration parameters. newline newlineMajority of the work proposed in the literature fails to provide generic solution using WMN which newlinecan provide acceptable performance under varied network size, number of users, coverage area, and newlineextensibility at run time. In other words scalability is an important feature expected from any WMN newlineapplication. newline newlineThe network performance can greatly be improved by enhancing the performance of the individual newlinelayers of TCP/IP protocol stack in a mesh router. Among these protocols, Medium Access Control newline(MAC) protocol plays an important role in supporting better network performance. Thus in this newlinework, MAC layer performance has been analyzed under MRMC WMN setup. newline newlineThe MAC layer uses medium access (MA) algorithms, and channel allocation (CA) algorithms to newlinerealize its functionality. The medium access algorithms provide a mechanism to choose one among newlinemany contending users in a given area. The channel allocation algorithms further provide a policy to newlineallocate a channel to the users in a static or dynamic manner. The medium access control algorithms newlinewill have more impact on the network performance than channel allocation algorithms. Thus this newlinework tries to address the medium access issues to