A Stepwise Multichannel MAC Protocol for Improving Bandwidth Utilization in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Multichannel media access control (MAC) protocols can increase wireless network capacities. The rendezvous problem is the most frequently encountered challenge in developing multichannel MAC protocols. Some studies have assumed that each device is equipped with one additional antenna; however, this increases the hardware cost. Other studies have divided the timeline of each channel into several beacon intervals. All stations are awake simultaneously on a predefined channel to enable rendezvous opportunities; however, this leads to low bandwidth utilization. This paper presents an efficient staggered multichannel MAC protocol (SMC-MAC) for ad hoc networks. By using a single antenna, the proposed SMC-MAC applies a staggered channel model with a home channel concept for exploiting multichannel bandwidth resources. Performance results reveal that the proposed SMC-MAC outperforms existing multichannel MAC protocols in terms of network throughput, control packet collision ratio, packet delay time, packet discarding, packet loss ratio, control overhead, and robustness.