An Adaptive Multi-channel MAC protocol for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Employing multiple channels is an effective way to improve the performance of wireless networks [2-10]. Some previous works on multiple channels [2-4] assume at least two transceivers and result in a higher cost on hardware requirements. The protocol in [5] uses a single transceiver and divides the beacon interval into two parts: channel negotiation and data transmission. However, the fixed length of channel negotiation interval limits the channel utilization. This paper proposed a new single transceiver MAC protocol that can exploit multiple channels effectively and dynamically adjust the length of negotiation interval to better utilize the wireless channel resources. The simulation results show that the proposed protocol achieves higher aggregate network throughput than the fixed schemes on various traffic loads.