Mi-MMAC: MIMO-based multi-channel MAC protocol for WLAN

In order to meet the proliferating demands in wireless local area networks (WLANs), the multi-channel media access control (MMAC) technology has attracted a considerable attention to exploit the increasingly scarce spectrum resources more efficiently. This paper proposes a novel multi-channel MAC to resolve the congestion on the control channel, named as Mi-MMAC, by multiplexing the control-radio and the data-radio as a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) array, working on both the control channel and the data channels alternately. Furthermore, we model Mi-MMAC as an M/M/k queueing system and obtain a closed-form approximate formula of the saturation throughput. Simulation results validate our model and analysis, and we demonstrate that the saturation throughput gain of the proposed protocol is close to 3.3 times compared with the dynamical channel assignment (DCA) protocol [1] under the few collisions condition.