A proactive routing protocol for multi-channel wireless ad-hoc networks (DSDV-MC)

We present an innovative routing protocol that utilizes multiple channels to improve performance in wireless ad-hoc networks. The basic idea of the protocol is to use multiple channels so that multiple useful transmissions can occur simultaneously, thus increasing network capacity. The proposed scheme requires minor changes to an existing proactive ad-hoc routing protocol and no modifications to the current IEEE 802.11 medium access control (MAC) protocol. To avoid inefficiencies due to periodic updates in the proactive routing protocol, the proposed scheme divides the network layer into control and data planes. Nodes send routing updates using the control channel and user packets using the data channel. We extend the Destination-Sequenced Distance-Vector (DSDV) routing protocol to a multi-channel version, DSDV-MC. Simulation results indicate that DSDV-MC exploits multiple channels to improve network capacity. Goodput increases in proportion to the number of available channels as the number of nodes and network load increase in both single-hop and multiple-hop networks.