3rd International ICST Conference on Broadband Communications, Networks, and Systems

Research Article

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

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1109/BROADNETS.2006.4374373,
        author={Tie Luo and Mehul Motani and Vikram Srinivasan},
        title={CAM-MAC: A Cooperative Asynchronous Multi-Channel MAC Protocol for Ad Hoc Networks},
        proceedings={3rd International ICST Conference on Broadband Communications, Networks, and Systems},
        publisher={IEEE},
        proceedings_a={BROADNETS},
        year={2006},
        month={10},
        keywords={},
        doi={10.1109/BROADNETS.2006.4374373}
    }
    
  • Tie Luo
    Mehul Motani
    Vikram Srinivasan
    Year: 2006
    CAM-MAC: A Cooperative Asynchronous Multi-Channel MAC Protocol for Ad Hoc Networks
    BROADNETS
    IEEE
    DOI: 10.1109/BROADNETS.2006.4374373
Tie Luo1,*, Mehul Motani1,*, Vikram Srinivasan1,*
  • 1: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore
*Contact email: tie@nus.edu.sg, motani@nus.edu.sg, elevs@nus.edu.sg

Abstract

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 and a version of CAM-MAC with the cooperation element removed. We use this to show the value of cooperation. Our results show significant improvement in terms of number of collisions and throughput for CAM-MAC. We also compare our protocol with MMAC and SSCH and show that CAM-MAC significantly outperforms both of them.