Exploiting Overlapped Bands for Efficient Broadcast in Multichannel Wireless Networks

In wireless networks, broadcasting is a fundamental communication primitive for network management and information sharing. However, in multichannel networks, broadcast efficiency is very poor as devices are distributed across various channels. Thus, a sender tries all channels to broadcast a single message, causing large overhead. In this paper, we propose a novel, drastically different scheme for efficient broadcast in multichannel networks. Our scheme leverages an overlapped band of adjacent channels, which is the frequency range that partially overlapped channels share within their channel boundaries. Specifically, a sender advertises a rendezvous channel through the overlapped band of adjacent channels; message sharing is done on the rendezvous channel. Our scheme employs signaling via overlapped band (SOB), which defines a new signal processing mechanism for communication via the overlapped band. SOB is integrated with the following Multiple Access Control (MAC) layer mechanisms: 1) Reserve idle spectrum fragment to reduce waiting time, 2) multisender agreement on rendezvous channel to support multisender broadcasts, and 3) reinforce switch notification to reduce the residing time at a wrong channel. Our scheme can also be integrated with two remarkably simple but efficient mechanisms for improving the packet delivery ratio and reducing delay in a multiple contention domain. We implemented our scheme on the SORA software radio platform. Experimental results validated communication through the overlapped band. Intensive simulation studies showed that our scheme dramatically outperformed a previous approach.