3M: A multi-group multi-pipeline multi-channel MAC protocol for wireless ad hoc networks

Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) is a well-known MAC protocol for single channel wireless ad-hoc networks. However, hidden terminal and false blocking problems may happen if DCF is directly applied to multi-channel environments. As a result, the paper proposes a Multi-group Multipipeline Multi-channel MAC protocol (3M MAC) for wireless multi-channel ad-hoc networks to avoid multi-channel hidden terminal and false blocking problems. 3M MAC divides a transmission into several subtransmissions. Each subtransmission is transmitted sequentially on all channels. Under this pipelinelike scheme, we further analyze the impact of the channel switch time and DATA packet size on network performance. Based on the analyzed results, a channel leak problem will happen to decrease the performance in case that the number of channels is large. The main concept of 3M MAC is to classify channels into groups to alleviate the channel leak problem. Finally, we compare 3M MAC with three well-known multi-channel MAC protocols and IEEE 802.11 DCF. Simulation results show that 3M MAC has the best performance in network throughput and transmission delay.