1A Routing Protocol for Utilizing Multiple Channels in Multi-Hop Wireless Networks with a Single Transceiver

Abstract — Wireless ad hoc networks often suffer from rapidly degrading performance as the number of users increases in the network. One of the major reasons for this rapid degradation of performance is the fact that users are sharing a single channel. Al-though widely deployed standards such as IEEE 802.11 provides multiple non-overlapping channels, most protocols for wireless ad hoc networks are designed to work in a single channel environ-ment. This is because most current devices are equipped with a single transceiver, and they can only listen to one channel at a time. This constraint complicates the protocol design, which discourages the use of multiple channels in ad hot networks. With multiple channels, multiple communications can simulta-neously take place in a region without interfering each other, re-sulting in increased capacity. In this paper, we consider issues re-garding multiple channels at the network layer, assuming a single channel MAC protocol such as IEEE 802.11 DCF. Also, we assume that each node in the network is equipped with a single transceiver. This set of assumptions is very practical, because most devices have a single wireless card implementing the IEEE 802.11 DCF protocol. We discuss issues in multi-channel routing, and propose a routing protocol which utilizes multiple channels with a single transceiver to improve network capacity. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol using simulations. The re-sults show that the proposed protocol can improve the throughput significantly, without using additional hardware or changing the MAC protocol. I