Asynchronous Session Reservation Multi-Channel MAC for Ad Hoc Networks

The use of multi-channel MAC protocols for mobile ad hoc networks has been seen as a very potent method of improving the throughput capacity of such networks. In recent past, a number of multi-channel MAC protocols have been proposed for mobile ad hoc networks that have increased the overall network throughput by quite some margin compared to their single channel counterparts. However, there are still many issues with these protocols that need to be resolved. Clock synchronization is one of the major overhead in a majority of the proposed multi-channel MAC protocols. In this paper we propose a new asynchronous multi-channel MAC protocol that does not require clock synchronization between mobile nodes. Our proposed protocol is an asynchronous solution that uses multiple channels for data transmission. In our proposed protocol, nodes use a single base channel when the network load is considerably lower and migrates to other channels when the network load increases beyond a threshold value. Also, nodes share multi-channel cooperation messages with their neighbors to further improve throughput. We have conducted extensive simulations to compare the performance of our protocol against the traditional IEEE 802.11b single channel and MMAC protocol. Simulation results show that our proposed protocol outperforms both IEEE 802.11b and MMAC protocol.