On the Construction of a WiMAX Mesh Tree

The IEEE 802.16 protocol, also known as WiMAX, has been designed to support long-range communications with high bitrates, using two operation modes: Point-to-Multi-Point (PMP) and Mesh. In the mesh mode, Subscriber Stations (SSs) can directly communicate with each other, thus forming a tree, and can be used to forward other’s data packets in a multihop fashion. On the contrary, in the PMP mode only one hop communication toward the Base Station (BS) is allowed. In this paper, we investigate the performance of the mesh mode by proposing an algorithm for constructing the WiMAX mesh tree. Our algorithm increases routes’ effective throughput by splitting long links into multiple shorter ones. We show through simulations that this approach leads to improving the throughput capacity of WiMAX-based wireless mesh networks.