A New Multi-channel Protocol Destined for Effective Broadcast on Ad Hoc WLANs

In multi-channel WLANs, MAC protocol allocates each transmission pair a channel selected for avoiding interference from each other. In the channel allocation phase, if the MAC protocol allocates the one channel iteratively to the multiple transmission pairs in narrowly-spaced, both channel utilization and network throughput can be improved. However, on such overloaded schedules, if any transmission takes place on one of transmission channels, numbers of terminals that can receive the transmission become fewer. Although B-MAC which is a multi-channel MAC protocol destined for broadcast, proposed to start broadcast after the elapse of a certain period of time, the waiting time of the certain period increases transmission overhead and it wastes the channel bandwidth. In this paper, we propose a new multi-channel MAC protocol employing abbreviation process of the waiting time on B-MAC to reduce transmission overhead. Performance evaluation clarifies that advantage of the proposed MAC protocol.