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.