Survey of multi-channel MAC protocols for IEEE 802.11-based wireless Mesh networks

This paper reviews multi-channel media access control (MAC) protocols based on IEEE 802.11 in wireless Mesh networks (WMNs). Several key issues in multi-channel IEEE 802.11-based WMNs are introduced and typical solutions proposed in recent years are classified and discussed in detail. The experiments are performed by network simulator version 2 (NS2) to evaluate four representative algorithms compared with traditional IEEE 802.11. Simulation results indicate that using multiple channels can substantially improve the performance of WMNs in single-hop scenario and each node equipped with multiple interfaces can substantially improve the performance of WMNs in multi-hop scenario.