Why a multichannel protocol can boost IEEE 802.11 performance
Andrea Baiocchi, Alfredo Todini, Andrea Valletta · 2004
We analyse a CSMA MAC protocol for ad hoc wireless networks, that uses one control channel and a number of data channels. The data channel employed in each transmission is dynamically selected with an exchange of frames on the control channel. We present simulation results obtained with both the multichannel protocol and the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol under different scenarios. We show that the multichannel protocol performs better than the single channel MAC under certain conditions, since the presence of hidden nodes has a smaller impact on its performance; we argue that this is mainly due to the separation operated between the control frames and the data frames.