AMCM: Adaptive Multi-Channel MAC Protocol for IEEE 802.11 Wireless Networks

This paper presents AMCM, a traffic-adaptive multichannel MAC protocol that increases the capacity of wireless network by enabling multiple concurrent transmissions on orthogonal frequency channels using a single halfduplex transceiver. AMCM is based on the IEEE 802.11 MAC but provides fine-grain, asynchronous coordination among locally interfering nodes for channel negotiation. By incorporating load-awareness, channel availability awareness and batch transmissions, our window-based approach achieves high channel utilization under varying load, while avoiding the control-window saturation problem as the number of channels increases. For single-hop scenarios, we show that, at low load, AMCM is comparable to IEEE 802.11 MAC, while under high load, AMCM delivers almost N× improvement gain over IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol, where N is the number of channels. AMCM also outperforms existing multi-channel MAC protocols [8, 11] by 100% and 150% respectively under high load at a lower hardware ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: BROADNETS
• Authors: Paul Tan, Mun Choon Chan
• Keywords: BROADNETS 2006, Ieee 802.11 Mac, MAC Protocols, Multichannel Mac Protocol