Performance Evaluation of Modified IEEE 802.11 MAC for Multi-Channel Multi-Hop Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

In this paper, the IEEE 802.11 multiple access control (MAC) protocol was modified for use in multi-channel, multi-hop ad hoc networks through the use of a new channel-status indicator. In particular, in the modified protocol, the RTS/CTS dialogue is exchanged on the common access control channel and data packets are transmitted on a selected traffic channel. We have evaluated the improvement due to the multi-channel use and we report in this paper on the results of the per-node throughput and the end-to-end delay for different network sizes. Using these results, we were able to propose a number of per-node throughput scaling laws. Our simulation results show that the per-node throughput with multiple channels for the fully connected, the line, and the grid ad hoc network topologies increases by 90% to 253%, by 47%, and by 139% to 163%, respectively, for networks with 16 to 64 nodes, as compared with that of a single channel.