Affiliations:
Department of Management and Information Systems, Prefectural University of Hiroshima, Hiroshima, Japan. E-mail: sigeyasu@pu-hiroshima.ac.jp
Correspondence:
[*]
Corresponding author: Tetsuya Shigeyasu, Department of Management and Information Systems, Prefectural University of Hiroshima, Hiroshima-city 734-8558, Japan. Tel.: +81 823 251 9818; Fax: +81 823 251 9818; E-mail: sigeyasu@pu-hiroshima.ac.jp.
Abstract: In multi-channel WLANs, the MAC protocol allocates a channel to each transmission pair while avoiding interference. In the channel allocation phase, if the MAC protocol allocates one channel iteratively to multiple narrowly spaced transmission pairs, both channel utilization and network throughput can be improved. However, such an approach leads to traffic overload; thus, if a transmission takes place over a transmission channel, the number of terminals that can receive the transmission decreases. B-MAC, a multi-channel MAC protocol designed for broadcast, starts a new broadcast transmission after waiting for a certain period of time; however, this waiting time increases the transmission overhead and degrades channel utilization. In this paper, we propose CA-BMAC, a new multi-channel MAC protocol that reduces the waiting time associated with B-MAC, and thus, the transmission overhead. Performance evaluations of the proposed protocol clarify its advantages over B-MAC.
Keywords: Multi-channel WLAN, broadcast, MAC protocol
