CA-BMAC: A collision avoidance multi-channel broadcast MAC protocol with a mechanism for reducing transmission overhead

Abstract

In multi-channel WLANs, the MAC protocol allocates a channel to each transmission pair while avoiding interference. In the channel allocation phase, if the MAC protocol allocates one channel iteratively to multiple narrowly spaced transmission pairs, both channel utilization and network throughput can be improved. However, such an approach leads to traffic overload; thus, if a transmission takes place over a transmission channel, the number of terminals that can receive the transmission decreases. B-MAC, a multi-channel MAC protocol designed for broadcast, starts a new broadcast transmission after waiting for a certain period of time; however, this waiting time increases the transmission overhead and degrades channel utilization. In this paper, we propose CA-BMAC, a new multi-channel MAC protocol that reduces the waiting time associated with B-MAC, and thus, the transmission overhead. Performance evaluations of the proposed protocol clarify its advantages over B-MAC.

Keywords

Multi-channel WLAN broadcast MAC protocol

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