A coordinated multiband MAC protocol for energy- efficient multi-Gbps wireless LANs

Due to bandwidth restraints on the 2.4/5 GHz industrial, scientific, and medical band, the 60 GHz millimeter wave spectrum with a large bandwidth of 7 GHz has been increasingly used because it is capable of achieving very high data rate of up to 7 Gbps. In this paper, an energy-efficient coordinated multiband medium access control (ECM-MAC) protocol for multi-Gbps wireless local area networks is proposed, which is capable of selecting the radio band on the basis of required bandwidth for different applications. In ECM-MAC, the 2.4 GHz band with omnidirectional antenna is used for transmitting control and management frames, and the 60 GHz band associated with directional antennas is used to transmit data at a multi-Gbps speed. The simulation study shows that ECM-MAC not only significantly saves energy by at least 28% but also reduces communication delay by at least 14%, compared to the conventional protocol.