TCP performance over IEEE 802.11 based multichannel MAC protocol for mobile ad hoc networks

In this paper, we propose a new IEEE 802.11 based multichannel MAC protocol, which satisfies a single transceiver constraint and which is still compatible with the IEEE 802.11 standard. Our proposed protocol does not need any additional transceivers, and we can make use of the current IEEE 802.11 hardware for the implementation of our multichannel protocol. We propose and investigate two kinds of channel selection algorithms, these are, the sender based channel selection scheme and the receiver based channel selection scheme. We evaluate the TCP performance over our proposed multichannel MAC protocol by the simulations taking account of the overhead, the time taken by changing the frequency channel and the time taken by the carrier sense in each channel. It is shown that our proposed scheme improves the performance significantly with a single transceiver. It is shown that the overhead costs are quite large in the multichannel MAC protocol, and the sender based channel selection scheme achieves better performance than that of the receiver based channel selection scheme in most cases. It is also shown that there exists a break-even value of the PLL synthesizer lockup time if we compare with the single channel IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol.