Distributed Asynchronous Reservation Multichannel MAC Protocol for Ad Hoc Networks

Cooperation among wireless nodes has been extensively studied in literals mainly used as data relaying mechanisms, however, it has been less exploited from control plane perspective to prevent undesirable transmission consequences such as data collisions.In this work, we investigate control plane cooperation in multichannel wireless ad hoc networks and propose a multichannel MAC protocol named by Distributed Asynchronous Reservation MAC(DARMAC). In DARMAC, nodes shares their information about network space in a dedicated control channel and cooperatively selects a collision free channel for the node that wants to transmit. Simulations are conducted for both single and multihop network with IEEE 802.11g/a parameter set, the results are compared with the recently proposed cooperative asynchronous multichannel MAC (CAMMAC). On average, the DARMAC has a performance gain over CAMMAC around 10-20%.