H-MMAC: A Hybrid Multi-channel MAC Protocol for Wireless Ad hoc Networks

Abstract—In regular wireless ad hoc network, the Medium Access Control (MAC) coordinates channel access among nodes and the throughput of the network is limited by the bandwidth of a single channel. The multi-channel MAC protocols can exploit the multiple channels to achieve a high throughput by enabling more concurrent transmissions in the network. Dynamic Channel Assignment (DCA [5]), Multi-channel MAC (MMAC [2]) and Pipelining Multi-channel MAC (-Mc [7]) are three multi-channel MAC protocol representatives. In the DCA protocol, the dedicated control channel cannot be fully utilized or causes the bottleneck depending on the number of channels. In the MMAC protocol, the data channel resources are wasted during the ATIM window. The data packet size impacts on the performance of -Mc protocol. In this paper, we propose a hybrid protocol that utilizes the multi-channel resources more efficiently than MMAC and other protocols. The H-MMAC protocol allows nodes to transmit data packets while other nodes try to negotiate the data channel during the ATIM window. The simulation results show that the proposed H-MMAC can improve the performance of the network: aggregate throughput, average delay and energy efficiency. Index Terms—Multi-channel, MAC protocol, Ad hoc networks