Busy Tone Multi Channel (BTMC): A New Multi Channel MAC protocol for Ad Hoc Networks

One of the main challenges in wireless networks is improving the network throughput and capacity. As commodity wireless network cards support the usage of orthogonal channels, allowing multiple simultaneous communications on these channels will improve the performance of wireless networks. Previous MAC protocols either were expensive to implement as they needed more than one packet radio per node or required synchronization or caused network partitioning. We propose a new MAC protocol that uses hash functions to distribute the control overhead over all the channels. In addition, it uses busy tones to reserve the channels and solve the hidden terminal and the channel rendezvous problems in multi channels. We compared our protocol with another multi-channel MAC protocol that uses more than one packet radio per node (DCA) and with 802.11. Our protocol produces comparable results with DCA and performs much better than 802.11. The results show that our protocol utilizes the multiple channels available to increase the capacity of the network. The proposed protocol is expected to improve the usage of ad hoc networks as it does not need synchronization like previous protocols.