In Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs), the mesh routers can compose a wireless backbone with low mobility. Use of current medium access protocol for such systems can result in low end-to-end throughput as the number of hops increases from a wired Internet Gateway. The standard IEEE 802.11s has an optional MAC enhancement feature called the Mesh Deterministic Access (MDA). However, it still contains a lot of control message overhead for setup and teardown procedure.
In this paper, we propose a Dynamic Virtual Timeslot Allocation (VTA) scheme for Virtual Slot Multiple Access (VSMA) based WMNs. The VSMA is a hybrid multiple access scheme based on both Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) and CSMA/CA. We solve some problems of the VSMA and enhanced it. In order to use the VSMA in multihop packet environments like WMNs, we have to allocate the virtual timeslot effectively. The VTA has an effective timeslot allocation strategy.
Through the ns-2 simulations, we first quantify the performance of the enhanced VSMA. Secondly, we show that the VTA scheme improves the total system throughput and achieves reasonable packet latency time and the fairness of mesh routers for WMNs.
