Multi-channel transmission with efficient delivery of routing information in maritime wimax mesh networks

There is a lack of broadband wireless network in sea to meet the increasing needs of modern maritime users and we have envisaged WiMAX mesh networks for high-speed and low-cost ship-to-ship/shore communications. In such a maritime WiMAX mesh network, due to the long transmission distance and the distributed scheduling among twohop neighbors, a single frequency channel may not be sufficient to provide the required bandwidth. An effective solution is to employ multiple frequency channels, by which the network capacity can be greatly increased. This paper presents operation of multi-channel transmission in maritime WiMAX mesh networks including allocation of minislots and frequency channels. The operation is based on a distributed adaptive time slots allocation and use of availability tables tracing minislots status. In the design, routing information is delivered in control subframe portion, and then the spreading of routing information can be speed up and less overhead in control slots can be used to describe and broadcast the availabilities of the minislots. Simulation results show that with the proposed scheme, by multi-channel transmission, the network performance can be improved in average packet delay and packets delivery ratio.