An opportunistic multiradio MAC protocol in multirate wireless ad hoc networks

Multi-channel multi-radio technology offers a great space of resource diversity. In this paper, we propose an opportunistic multiradio MAC (OMMAC) protocol to improve system performance by utilizing multiradio diversity. The proposed OMMAC collects the physical layer feedback over multiple radios simultaneously and schedules multiple transmissions on the available channels accordingly. The channel based packet scheduling leverages the channel quality information to jointly select data rates, channels and packets to increase the overall spectral usage of multiple radios which have not been exploited in previous literature. Extensive results from both analysis and ns2 simulations demonstrate that OMMAC significantly improves the network throughput in both single- and multi-hop wireless multirate networks in terms of both aggregate and per-radio throughput.