A New Multi-channel Medium Access Control Protocol For Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

With Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) development and practical needs,the needs of information transmission is growing, how to provide a networkMedium Access Control (MAC) protocol with high throughput for the networkhas become a research hotspot. The traditional MAC protocols use only onechannel for information transmission, so the throughput is restricted by signalinterference of neighboring nodes. In many applications, the nodes in thenetwork can use more than one channel for information transmission. Differentnode pairs can transmit information concurrently on different channels, this factprovide potential for improving network throughput. In recent years, manypractical multi-channel MAC protocols are proposed. However, thesemulti-channel MAC protocols have various constraints, for example, someprotocols require network synchronization, some protocols require each nodebeen assigned a fixed frequency hopping sequence, some protocols havenetwork bottleneck in certain channel. Therefore, propose a suitablemulti-channel protocol for MANET is very important.This paper proposes a multi-channel MAC protocol based on cross-channelnegotiation. The basic ideas of the protocol are: divided the channels in twocategories. One control channel which is used for channel negotiation, theremaining channels is data channels which are used for information transmission;use cross-channel negotiation to reduce the traffic load of control channel; eachnode maintains a channel number which indicates a prior data channel forinformation transmission, in order to reduce collisions in the transmissionprocess.The work of this project includes: 1. Design a multi-channel MAC protocol based on cross-channel negotiation:Propose a multi-channel MAC protocol based on cross-channel negotiation, andsolved four main problems: channel negotiation, channel competition, hiddenterminal problem, and exposed terminal problem.2. Implement protocols in simulation environment and data analysis:Implement the proposed protocol and comparison protocol in a NS-2simulator,and design the evaluation scenarios; gather and analyses experiment data toevaluate the throughput of the protocols under various conditionsThe experiments on simulator show that: Compared with other protocolsunder same condition, the proposed protocol provides higher network throughputand has better scalability.