A multi-channel medium access control protocol for multicast in mobile ad-hoc network

In mobile ad-hoc network, some multi-channel MAC protocols utilize multiple channels to reduce the collision of wireless transmission and thus get high throughput. These multi-channel MAC protocols aim at improving the performance of unicast communication, and multicast data are generally transmitted as broadcast. So multicast cannot benefit from the multi-channel technique. This paper proposes a multi-channel media access control protocol for multicast (MCMAC) which uses multi-channel techniques to improve multicast performance. To improve the reliability of MAC layer, we extended a reliable multi-channel MAC protocol for multicast (RMCMAC) based on MCMAC. Taking ODMRP [S.-J. Lee et al., 2000] as an example of multicast routing protocols, we evaluate the multicast performance of MCMAC and RMCMAC for ad hoc networks via detailed simulation.