Starvation mitigation through multi-channel coordination in CSMA multi-hop wireless networks
Jingpu Shi, Theodoros Salonidis, Edward W. Knightly · 2006
Existing multi-channel protocols have been demonstrated to significantly increase aggregate throughput compared to single-channel protocols. However, we show that despite such improvements in aggregate throughput, existing protocols can lead to flow starvation in a multi-hop network, a phenomenon that also occurs with single-channel protocols. In this paper, we devise Asynchronous Multi-channel Coordination Protocol (AMCP), a distributed medium access protocol that not only increases aggregate throughput, but more importantly, addresses the fundamental coordination problems that lead to starvation. Based on AMCP's counter-starvation mechanisms, we analytically derive and experimentally validate an ap-proximate lower bound on the throughput of any flow in an arbitrary topology. We also demonstrate that AMCP can deliver significantly higher per-flow throughput than both IEEE 802.11 and existing multi-channel solutions. In addition to its performance properties, AMCP is both simple in that it operates using the primitives of IEEE 802.11 DCF, and cost-effective in that it requires only a single half-duplex transceiver and no infrastructure support.