Research On Multi-channel Mac Protocol In Ad Hoc Network

Ad hoc network is a non-center, multi-hop, self-organization, peer-to-peer communication network that consists of several wireless nodes. Each node can be used as the host, but also can serve as a router, forwarding data to other nodes. Recently, Ad hoc network becomes the hot spot of wireless communications and Internet due to its flexible mobility support, and continuous and seamless multimedial communication.Ad hoc network is a complicated system. It involves a lot of technical aspects. The design of the media access control (MAC) protocol is one of the key technologies of the Ad hoc network, which directly impacts the network performance such as the throughput, delay and the packet-lost-radio etc.. Meanwhile, with the rapid population of wireless communication devices, wireless channel becomes a type of inereasingly rare nature resource. Thus, the combination of wireless Ad hoc network and multi-channel technology has gained more and more attention from academy and industry. Combined with multi-channel technology, wireless channels and dynamic network topology, thus it can improve wireless channel utiliziation.Because of the own features of multi-channel Ad hoc network, making multi-channel MAC protocol design is facing many new challenging technical problems. Therefore, this article on the multi-channel MAC protocol for Ad hoc network is in depth study.This paper introduces the development history, characteristics, and structure of Ad hoc network, and the current focus of the study. Then we studied the MAC protocols of Ad hoc network, especially, the single-channel, dual-channel, multi-channel MAC protocol for an in-depth research. Finally, two asynchronous multi-channel MAC protocols based on cooperation strategy and the physical address were proposed, the simulation results show that the proposed protocols can improve the average throughput of the network significantly and reduce the average packet delay simultaneously.