Design and evaluation of a new MAC protocol for long-distance 802.11 mesh networks

  • Authors:
  • Bhaskaran Raman;Kameswari Chebrolu

  • Affiliations:
  • IIT Kanpur, Kanpur, INDIA;IIT Kanpur, Kanpur, INDIA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 11th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

802.11 has been used well beyond its original intended use of WLANs. Of particular interest to us in this paper is its use in long-distance mesh networks being designed/used for low-cost rural connectivity. We describe in detail a new MAC protocol, called 2P, that is suited for such networks in terms of efficiency. A significant challenge here is the implementation of this protocol on top of off-the-shelf 802.11 hardware, to preserve the cost benefits. We show how this can be achieved, by exploiting the flexibilities available within Prism2-based chipsets. We then present the dependence of 2P on the network topology, and show that it is indeed possible to design in practice, network topologies compatible with 2P. We describe experimental as well as simulation-based evaluations of 2P, and show that 2P achieves significant performance improvement (as much as 20 times more throughput) over 802.11 CSMA/CA in long-distance mesh networks.