Wireless Mesh Network Capacity Achievable Over the CSMA/CA MAC

This paper presents a theoretical analysis of the maximum throughput of a wireless mesh backhaul network that is achievable over a practical CSMA/CA Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol. The authors resort to the Multi-Commodity Flow (MCF) formulation augmented with the conflict-graph constraints, while use a novel approach to take into account the collision overhead in the distributed CSMA/CA MAC. Such overhead due to random access has been ignored by the existing MCF-based capacity studies, which assume impractical centralized scheduling and result in aggressive capacity planning, unachievable over the CSMA/CA MAC.