Adaptive Channel Selection Through Collaborative Sensing

Proper channel selection is essential to exploit the benefits of multi-channel systems by distributing conflicting transmissions across non-interfering channels. Critical to channel selection is the channel quality metric. We propose a busy time ratio (BTR) metric that captures channel contention and user traffic load under a variety of network dynamics. We also propose a distributed collaborative sensing scheme to reduce sensing overhead and energy consumptions. The proposed algorithms can be implemented using conventional 802.11 hardware with single radio interface. The proposed metric can be integrated with routing and channel selection. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms the existing channel selection methods.