ECU-MAC: A multi-channel MAC protocol for enhancing channel utilization in wireless networks

Multi-channel MAC protocols have recently attracted significant attention in wireless networking research because they possess the ability to boost the capacity of wireless ad hoc networks. However, the common challenges in developing multi-channel MAC protocol are the Multi-channel Hidden Terminal (MHT) problem and the Rendezvous problem. This paper proposes an ECU-MAC aiming at efficiently coping with the MHT and Rendezvous problems, while increasing the channel utilization and improving the network throughputs. One novel concept of the proposed ECU-MAC is to exploit the bandwidth resource of ATIM windows of all channels for exchanging data such that the network throughput and channel utilization can be improved. Another key concept of the ECU-MAC is to allow one station to exchange data with multiple stations on several data channels within a beacon interval. Performance evaluation reveals that the proposed ECU-MAC outperforms existing MMAC and DCA protocols in terms of network throughput and average packet delay.