Dynamic Beacon Collision Detection/Avoidance Mechanism in WLAN-based Mesh networks

Every node in wireless multi-hop mesh networks periodically transmits its own beacon to announce its existence. Through the reception of beacon messages, every node can detect who are neighboring nodes. Therefore, if there are some losses of beacon messages, mesh nodes cannot configure the routing path, which is related to the inefficient network overhead due to wrong routing information and long paths. In this paper, we propose a dynamic beacon collision detection and avoidance (BCDA) mechanism that can actively adapt to beacon collision status due to node movement or new nodes joining. Each mesh node monitors the collision event by comparing the received beacon timing information from neighboring nodes with its own beacon timing information. It is shown from the performance evaluations that the proposed BCDA mechanism reduces the beacon collision ratio and also enhances the network throughput through the adaptive path configuration.