STB-MAC: Staggered Multichannel Traffic Balanced MAC Protocol in Wireless Networks

Multichannel medium-access-control (MAC) protocols have attracted much attention because they possess the ability to boost the capacity of wireless networks. In the literature, a staggered channel model has been proposed to handle the rendezvous problem and improve the bandwidth usage. However, it might cause a channel traffic unbalance (CTU) problem in which certain channels are busy whereas others are idle. It is a great challenge to balance the traffic of each channel because each station finds it difficult to manage the incoming slots in a distributed manner. To cope with the CTU problem, a novel MAC protocol the staggered multichannel traffic-balanced MAC (STB-MAC) protocol, is proposed, which applies the staggered channel model that migrates traffic from busy channels to idle channels. Performance evaluation reveals that the proposed STB-MAC achieves superior performance in network throughput and packet delay.