Control-Channel-Reuse-Based Multiple-Channel MAC (CRM-MAC) for Ad Hoc Networks

Most of the existing Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols for ad hoc networks involve the use of a single wireless channel as the transmission medium. Throughput of a single channel MAC protocol is limited by the bandwidth of a single channel. Use of multiple channels helps to alleviate this problem. One of the existing methodologies towards using multiple channels in a MAC protocol for ad-hoc networks is to assign one channel as the control channel and the rest as data channels. However, dedicating one channel completely for control messages leads to a poor utilization of the available bandwidth. In this paper, we propose a Control-channel-Reuse-based Multiple-channel MAC (CRM-MAC) protocol in ad-hoc net-works which identifies mechanisms to improve the bandwidth utilization. The proposed protocol derives from an existing multi-channel MAC solution called Dynamic Channel Assignment (DCA). We demonstrate the improvement in our proposed protocol over DCA through extensive simulations.