2nd International ICST Conference on Broadband Networks

Research Article

On the efficacy of separating control and data into different frequency bands

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1109/ICBN.2005.1589665,
        author={Pradeep Kyasanur and Jitendra Padhye and Paramvir Bahl},
        title={On the efficacy of separating control and data into different frequency bands},
        proceedings={2nd International ICST Conference on Broadband Networks},
        publisher={IEEE},
        proceedings_a={BROADNETS},
        year={2006},
        month={2},
        keywords={},
        doi={10.1109/ICBN.2005.1589665}
    }
    
  • Pradeep Kyasanur
    Jitendra Padhye
    Paramvir Bahl
    Year: 2006
    On the efficacy of separating control and data into different frequency bands
    BROADNETS
    IEEE
    DOI: 10.1109/ICBN.2005.1589665
Pradeep Kyasanur1,*, Jitendra Padhye2,*, Paramvir Bahl2,*
  • 1: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  • 2: Microsoft Research
*Contact email: kyasanur@uiuc.edu, padhye@microsoft.com, bahl@microsoft.com

Abstract

Radio spectrum allocated for use in unlicensed wireless networks is distributed across non-contiguous frequency bands. Existing MAC protocols, like IEEE 802.11, operate only in contiguous bands. Several small slices of frequency are available in lower frequency bands that are not utilized. We propose utilizing a sliver of unused spectrum in the lower frequency band as a low rate control channel to improve the capacity of infrastructure and multi-hop wireless networks. The proposed control channel-based MAC Protocol (C2M) increases the throughput by moving the contention resolution overheads to the separate low rate channel. We allow simultaneous channel contention and data transmission by incorporating advance reservation on the control channel, and data aggregation on the data channel. Simulation results show that compared to IEEE 802.11, C2M significantly improves network performance.