Within the wireless mesh network, a bottleneck problem arises as the numberof concurrent traffic flows (NCTF) increases over a single common controlchannel, as it is for most conventional networks. To alleviate this problem,this paper proposes a two-stage coordination multi-radio multi-channel MAC(TSC-M2MAC) protocol that designates all available channels as both controlchannels and data channels in a time division manner through a two-stagecoordination. At the first stage, a load balancing breadth-first-search-basedvertex coloring algorithm for multi-radio conflict graph is proposed tointelligently allocate multiple control channels. At the second stage, aREQ/ACK/RES mechanism is proposed to realize dynamical channel allocation fordata transmission. At this stage, the Channel-and-Radio Utilization Structure(CRUS) maintained by each node is able to alleviate the hidden nodes problem;also, the proposed adaptive adjustment algorithm for the Channel Negotiationand Allocation (CNA) sub-interval is able to cope with the variation of NCTF.In addition, we design a power saving mechanism for the TSC-M2MAC to decreaseits energy consumption. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol isable to achieve higher throughput and lower end-to-end packet delay thanconventional schemes. They also show that the TSC-M2MAC can achieve loadbalancing, save energy, and remain stable when the network becomes saturated.
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