An Energy Efficient Multi-channel MAC Protocol for wireless ad hoc networks

The IEEE 802.11 [1] provides multiple channels for wireless communications at the Physical Layer, but the Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol is only designed for a single channel. If the multiple channels can be exploited by multi-channel MAC protocol, there can be multiple transmissions on different channels. Besides that, the power control algorithm can improve the spatial reuse of wireless channels. In this paper, we combine the multi-channel MAC protocol and the power control algorithm together to exploit multiple channels and improve frequency reuse. The main idea of our proposal is to use IEEE 802.11 Power Saving Scheme (PSM) with different transmission power levels in the ATIM window and the data window. All nodes transmit ATIM/ATIM-ACK/ATIM-RES messages with the maximum power while contending the data channel during the ATIM window, and use the minimum required transmission power in the data window on their negotiated channels. The simulation results show that the proposed E-MMAC improve the performance of the network: aggregate throughput, average delay and energy efficiency.