Distributed multi-channel topology-transparent broadcast scheduling in ad hoc networks

Topology-transparent scheduling algorithms can work well in mobile ad hoc networks, since they are oblivious to the network topology changes and can provide throughput and delay guarantees. Recently, it has been shown that topology-transparent algorithms can provide comparable or even better performance, compared to topology-dependent algorithms. However, most existing topology-transparent scheduling algorithms are designed for single channel networks and few work have been done in multi-channel (MC) networks. In this paper, we focus on broadcasting and propose a distributed multi-channel topology-transparent broadcast scheduling algorithm. In our algorithm, each node randomly selects one or several subchannels to transmit and utilizes both assigned and unassigned slots efficiently. We study the performance of our algorithm analytically and obtain the optimal number of selected subchannels that maximizes the throughput. The simulation results show that our proposed algorithm outperforms existing multi-channel topology-transparent broadcast scheduling algorithms dramatically. More importantly, our work answers the question “Will dividing the spectrum into subchannels lead to a better network performance?” under different network configurations.