Title: TIE-MAC: tolerable interference estimation-based concurrent medium access control for WLAN mesh networks

Authors: Lei Lei; Shengsuo Cai; Liang Zhou; Xiaoming Chen; Xinxin Feng

Addresses: Key Laboratory of Radar Imaging and Microwave Photonics, Nanjing Univ. Aeronaut, Astronaut, Ministry of Education, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing 210016, China ' Key Laboratory of Radar Imaging and Microwave Photonics, Nanjing Univ. Aeronaut, Astronaut, Ministry of Education, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing 210016, China ' College of Telecommunications and Information Engineering, Nanjing University of Posts & Telecommunications, Nanjing 210023, China ' Key Laboratory of Radar Imaging and Microwave Photonics, Nanjing Univ. Aeronaut, Astronaut, Ministry of Education, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing 210016, China ' Key Laboratory of Radar Imaging and Microwave Photonics, Nanjing Univ. Aeronaut, Astronaut, Ministry of Education, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing 210016, China

Abstract: This paper proposes TIE-MAC, tolerable interference estimation-based concurrent medium access control protocol for wireless local area network (WLAN) mesh networks. The goal is to increase spatial reuse, achieve high throughput and reduce average energy consumption through exploiting concurrent transmissions among neighbouring nodes. TIE-MAC confirms that the tolerable interference of the receiver plays a key role in determining the efficiency of concurrent transmission scheduling, and puts forward a novel tolerable interference estimation mechanism, enabling the receivers to precisely estimate their tolerable interference. Meanwhile, a concurrent transmission gap (CTG) is inserted between the transmission of the RTS/CTS and data packets to offer the nodes in the vicinity of the receiver the chance to schedule possible overlapping transmissions. The size of the CTG is optimised using an exponential smoothing model-based adjustment algorithm. Moreover, sequenced acknowledgements (ACKs) are introduced in TIE-MAC and used in combination with the tolerable interference estimation mechanism to avoid possible collisions among different concurrent transmissions. Simulation results show that TIE-MAC gains better throughput and energy consumption performance in comparison with existing concurrent transmission protocols as well as the active WLAN mesh standard.

Keywords: WLAN mesh networks; concurrent MAC; medium access control; tolerable interference estimation; throughput enhancement; energy saving; wireless LANs; local area networks; spatial reuse; energy consumption; concurrent transmissions; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAHUC.2015.073437

International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing, 2015 Vol.20 No.4, pp.249 - 261

Received: 29 Jul 2013
Accepted: 10 Feb 2014
Published online: 08 Dec 2015 *

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