A Dual Channel Mac Protocol for Providing High Spatial Reuse and Channel Efficiency

Improvement of spatial reuse, channel efficiency and collision avoid are the main approaches to improve the performance of MAC protocol. IEEE 802.11 protocol, which is the standard MAC protocol of Ad Hoc Networks, hardly provides any mechanisms for improving the spatial reuse and channel efficiency. It mitigates channel collision only by employing RTS and CTS frames. In this paper, we propose a novel dual channel MAC protocol (DCMAC) which combined concurrent transmission, collision avoidance and channel reservation together. DTS fame is introduced to avoid collision and reserve channel. Three NAVs are maintained to schedule both data channel and control channel. One NAV is used to schedule the control channel, while two others are used to schedule the transmission function and receipt function of data channel respectively. Simulation result shows that DCMAC protocol improves the throughput by up to 35% and transmission efficiency of DATA by up to 20% compared with IEEE 802.11 protocol.