A REVIEW OF MULTIHOP BASED MEDIUM ACCESS CONTROL (MAC) PROTOCOL TO TACKLE BOTH MULTIPLE ACCESS AND MULTIHOP ISSUES IN WIRELESS MESH NETWORK (WMN)

Vigneswara Rao Gannapathy, Lim Kim Chuan, Siva Kumar Subramaniam, Zahriladha Bin Zakaria

Abstract: Multihop WMN plays an important role in the next-generation wireless communication. It promised a solution to provide ubiquitous wireless access at low cost and with architecture that easy to be deployed and maintained. A big challenge in designing WMN is to utilize the shared medium, the wireless communication channel, effectively. MAC protocol, the shared medium access controller, therefore plays a critical role in the channel utilization. The better the channel is utilized in WMN, the better is the performance of the WMN. One of the techniques to improve channel utilization is by enabling the concurrent transmission and providing an efficient forwarding operation. However, the existing IEEE 802.11 MAC does not supports those operations in WMN thus degrades the throughput significantly. To date, various multihop based MAC protocols was developed and proposed by researchers with the aim to regulate and solve access issues among all radio nodes in the network. This article presents an exhaustive survey of multihop based contention MAC protocols that proposed to solve exposed node and forwarding issues in multihop WMN. Besides that, the comparison, their operations, advantages and disadvantages of all identified MAC protocols also will be explained and presented in this article.

Keywords: Multihop, Wireless Mesh Network (WMN), Medium Access Control (MAC), Contention Based Protocol, Network Allocation Vector (NAV)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15623/ijret.2017.0611009