Capacity Region of a Wireless Mesh Backhaul Network Over the CSMA/CA MAC

This paper studies the maximum throughput that can be supported by a given wireless mesh backhaul network, over a practical CSMA/CA Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol. This paper resorts to the Multi-Commodity Flow (MCF) formulation, augmented with the conflict-graph constraints, to jointly compute the maximum throughput and the associated optimal network dimensioning; while use a novel approach to take into account the collision overhead in the distributed CSMA/CA MAC. Such overhead has been ignored by the existing MCF-based capacity studies, which assume impractical centralized scheduling and result in aggressive network dimensioning, unachievable over the CSMA/CA MAC.