Study of the enhanced algorithm for control information dissemination in Wi-Fi Mesh networks

摘要

Various networking protocols currently used in wireless networks disseminate much control information. In particular, the deterministic channel access protocol (called MCCA) specified in the IEEE 802.11 standard sends information about channel reservations. The standard proposes a novel approach to reduce this overhead, which is based on dividing various pieces of control information into several groups. When the content of some group changes, the station sends a differential update related to this group. However, a group management algorithm (GMA) - which directly affects the performance of such an approach - is not specified in the standard. Previous studies propose a simple GMA which is based on the idea to use as low number of groups as possible. However, when the content of groups changes very fast, the overhead is high. In this paper, we propose and study an enhanced GMA which manyfold reduces the overhead. We develop an analytical model to evaluate the proposed GMA performance and to find its optimal parameters. We also obtain an explicit formula for the optimal parameters in the asymptotic case. We show that such asymptotically optimal parameters, which do not depend on traffic parameters, provide low overhead in non-asymptotic case as well. Thus, the proposed GMA can be easily implemented without any complex method for parameters adjustment.1