Overhead analysis on beacon broadcasting for self-organizing MIMC ad-hoc networks

In self-organizing mobile ad-hoc networks with multi-interface and multi-channel (MIMC), nodes need to rendezvous on a channel using any interface, when there is neither a dedicated channel nor a common control channel. To design such mission-critical combat networks that are alike cognitive radio networks, we modified the existing IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol by extending beacons, such that each interface randomly generates a beacon that includes its channel information. As multiple interfaces of many nodes generate beacons within a transmission range, there is a possibility of beacon collisions on the same channel at a certain node. Through the results based on our implementation with the OPNET simulator, we verify that the system works well while the probability of beacon collisions is very small.