An Opportunistic MAC in Multichannel Multiradio Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Opportunistic scheduling has been known as one of the possible ways of exploiting multi-user diversity, which comes from the time-varying propagation characteristics and broadcast nature of wireless radios, to improve communication efficiency and reliability. Multi-channel multi-radio technology has offered great opportunity in designing wireless network MAC protocol to utilize all kinds of resource diversities. Other than multi-user diversity, we identify the unique multi-radio diversity which can be exploited in multi-radio wireless network to improve network throughput performance. The proposed opportunistic multi-radio MAC (OMMAC) takes advantage of multi-radio diversity to increase the spectrum usage as much as possible. Extensive NS2 simulation results demonstrate that OMMAC significantly improves the network throughput in both single and multi-hop wireless networks.