CAM-MAC: A Cooperative Asynchronous Multi-Channel MAC Protocol for Ad Hoc Networks

— Medium access control (MAC) protocols have been studied under different contexts for several years now. In all these MAC protocols, nodes make independent decisions on when to transmit a packet and when to back-off from transmission. In this paper, we introduce the notion of node cooperation into MAC protocols. Cooperation adds a new degree of freedom which has not been explored before. Specifically we study the design of cooperative MAC protocols in an environment where each node is equipped with a single transceiver and has multiple channels to choose from. Nodes cooperate by helping each other select a free channel to use. We show that this simple idea of cooperation has several qualitative and quantitative advantages. Our cooperative asynchronous multi-channel MAC protocol (CAM-MAC) is extremely simple to implement and, unlike other multi-channel MAC protocols, is naturally asynchronous. We conduct extensive simulation experiments. We first compare CAM-MAC with IEEE 802.11b a...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: BROADNETS
• Authors: Tie Luo, Mehul Motani, Vikram Srinivasan
• Keywords: BROADNETS 2006, Cooperative Mac Protocols, MAC Protocols, Multi-channel Mac Protocols