A Multi-Channel MAC Protocol for Improving Channel Utilization in Wireless Networks

Multi-channel MAC protocols have attracted much attention because they possess the ability to boost the capacity of wireless ad hoc networks. In previous works, a lot of multi-channel protocols, such as DCCB[1-2], HB[4], and SB[5-7], have been proposed to cope with the rendezvous problem and efficiently utilize the bandwidth resources. However, these protocols might cause the channel traffic unbalance problem where some channels are busy but the other channels are idle. To cope with the channel traffic unbalance problem, this paper proposes a novel multi-channel MAC protocol for ad hoc networks, called CTB-MAC. The proposed CTB-MAC protocol is able to migrate the traffic from the busy channel to the idle channel so that the traffic loads can be dispersed among multiple channels to improve the channel utilization. Experimental results reveal that the proposed CTB-MAC outperforms existing MMAC and SMC-MAC in terms of network throughput, data slot utilization, and channel utilization.