Handling Deafness Problem of Scheduled Multi-Channel Polling MACs

Combining scheduled channel polling with channel diversity is a promising way for a MAC protocol to achieve high energy efficiency and performance under both light and heavy traffic conditions. However, the deafness problem may cancel out the benefit of channel diversity. In this paper, we first investigate the deafness problem of scheduled multi-channel polling MACs with experiments. Then we propose and evaluate two schemes to handle the deafness problem. Our experiment shows that deafness is a significant reason for performance degradation in scheduled multi-channel polling MACs. A proper scheme should be chosen depending on the traffic pattern and the design objective.