On the Performance Evaluation of Multi-channel MAC Protocols

The number of devices enhanced with wireless communication capabilities is increasing at a fast pace. Such increase has exacerbated the quest for efficient medium access control protocols. In fact, the possibility of providing concurrent access to multiple channels, thus increasing throughput and reducing channel access delays, has been widely investigated. Among the alternatives for providing multi-channel access is the dedicated control channel (DCC), the single rendezvous (SR) and the parallel rendezvous (PR) protocols. The goal of these protocols is to provide the means for managing channel access to multi, orthogonal, channels. These protocols are often evaluated in ideal settings where they have shown to provide significant improvements in terms of throughput. However, when confronted with a realistic setting, the performance of such protocols is unknown. The main contribution of this work is to present an evaluation of multi-channel access control protocols. The performance evaluation focuses on identifying the key benefits and limitations of the DCC, SR and PR strategies. These strategies have been implemented in the OMNET++ simulator using the MiXiM framework. The simulation results show that the PR strategy obtains higher throughput when source-destination pairs are confined to the same channel sequence. However, due to missing receiver problems, which occurs when source and destination nodes do not know about each other's whereabouts, the throughput of the PR strategy decays considerably. In fact, with a limited number of channels, the performance of the SR and DCC strategies provide similar results as that of the PR strategy.