Dynamic Decentralized Multi-Channel MAC Protocols

In this paper, we propose new dynamic decentralized multi-channel multiple access (MAC) protocols and study their performance. Our protocols build on slotted Aloha, but extend it in several ways to improve flow completion time and throughput, as follows: (i) channels are assigned to flows rather than packets to eliminate per packet collisions, thus the total number of collisions is reduced, and (ii) each flow owns or drops channels dynamically considering successful transmissions, thus the number of owned channels adapts to varying traffic. We present an analysis of the stability region and of flow completion times, for our algorithms, and show that one of them can achieve close to 100% throughput if flow sizes are large. We demonstrate by extensive simulations that, compared to current multi-channel MAC protocols, our algorithms improve flow completion time and throughput in wireless local area and mesh networks.