A very important element of a wireless mesh network (WMN) required to keep the network functional is the routing protocol. Since WMNs typically have static topology, a proactive routing protocol which collects various information that can also be used in a cross-layer manner might be selected. As OLSR is one such protocol which is among the most popular routing protocols in ad-hoc and mesh networks, in this study we investigate the channel access problem in WMNs with OLSR as the routing protocol. We present OA-TDMA (OLSR-Aware TDMA), a TDMA based cross-layer channel access scheduling scheme which uses the information collected by the OLSR routing protocol. In OA-TDMA, each node makes decisions in a distributed manner with no central control, using the local information disseminated by the OLSR protocol. The distinctive feature of the OA-TDMA protocol lies in its weighting scheme where OA-TDMA approximates the traffic passing through each node by using the local topology information collected by OLSR. Our simulations on ns-2 confirm the performance improvement achieved by the combination of OLSR and OA-TDMA over other scheduling schemes considered for comparison purposes.

DATE: 17 November, 2008, Monday@ 16:40
PLACE: EA 409