A reliable channel reservation based multi-channel MAC protocol with a single transceiver

The multi-channel MAC protocols have been proposed recently to improve the network capacity by accommodating more concurrent transmissions. In this paper, we propose a distributed multi-channel MAC protocol using reliable multiple channel reservation with only a single transceiver. Specifically, the control handshake information is reserved to be re-broadcasted over the control channel to address the multi-channel hidden terminal problem. Besides, by reserving multiple data transmission opportunities on the selected data channel, the control channel congestion is further relieved. Then we prove that the multi-channel hidden terminal problem can be addressed using reservation on the control channel, and analyze the effectiveness of the proposed protocol in the aspect of the average number of data channels simultaneously utilized. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed protocol is able to achieve nearly 2.5 times the saturation throughput of DCA protocol [15] when five-step channel reservation is adopted.