Gradient Based Routing Support for Cooperative Multi-channel MAC in Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

Growing popularity of wireless ad hoc networks leads to higher demands on performance of all TCP/IP stack layers. Usually ad hoc networks operate according to IEEE 802.11 standard which provides a MAC layer protocol that uses a single channel for data transmissions. However, increasing the number of data channels on MAC layer improves performance of ad hoc wireless networks by letting nodes simultaneously transmit data through different channels. Nevertheless network performance improvement will be diminished if routing mechanisms are not efficient and reactive to load changes within the network. In this paper we introduce a multi-channel MAC layer cooperative technique that integrates gradient based routing to support multi-hop wireless transmission. We show that using the gradient based routing to support multi-channel MAC protocols can enhance overall throughput of the network, and improve network load balancing. Simulations have also been conducted to validate the proposed solution.