TMMAC: An Energy Efficient Multi-Channel MAC Protocol for Ad Hoc Networks

This work presents a TDMA based multi-channel MAC protocol called TMMAC for Ad Hoc Networks. TMMAC requires only a single half-duplex radio transceiver on each node. In addition to explicit frequency negotiation which is adopted by conventional multi-channel MAC protocols, TMMAC introduces lightweight explicit time negotiation. This two-dimensional negotiation enables TMMAC to exploit the advantage of both multiple channels and TDMA, and achieve aggressive power savings by allowing nodes that are not involved in communication to go into doze mode. Moreover, TMMAC dynamically adjusts its negotiation window size based on different traffic patterns, which further improves communication throughput and energy savings. In this paper, the performance of TMMAC is analyzed and evaluated. The evaluations show that TMMAC achieves up to 113% higher communication throughput while consuming 74% less per packet energy over the state-of-the-art multi-channel MAC protocols for single-transceiver wireless devices.