Adaptive channel switching for centralized MAC protocols in multihop wireless networks

The centralized medium access control (centralized MAC) protocol, which utilizes an Access Point (AP) to coordinate stations in wireless networks, guarantees the quality of service (QoS) for transmission, and provides good throughput in the highly congested network. However, the centralized MAC protocol cannot be adopted in ad hoc networks, because it provides only single-hop transmission. This paper proposes a multihop mechanism for centralized MAC protocols to operate on various network topologies. The proposed mechanism provides excellent throughput for both inter-subnet and intra-subnet links, and alleviates the hidden terminal problem. Experimental results reveal that the optimal configuration on the proposed mechanism and the comparison between our mechanism and other multihop forwarding mechanisms. The results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism outperforms other multihop forwarding mechanisms in terms of throughput.