A Contention Mechanism Based on Pulse/Tone Signal For a Multi-Channel Environment

The rising number of wireless devices has impacted directly on the interference and saturation levels of the ISM bands. Among the approaches proposed to minimize this problem is the use of use multiple orthogonal channels. In this context, a major challenge is to coordinate and grant channel access to the transmitting devices. A common strategy is to use a dedicated channel, also known as control channel, to select the nodes that shall communicate over the available data channels. In this work, we present a new contention mechanism, termed CRP (Collision Resolution Period), which was designed to assist in the contention resolution task. Compared with the IEEE 802.11 standard, the CRP has able to increase the aggregate throughput by over 300%. Also, a queuing theory model was used to evaluate the limits of the control channel utilization.