M&M: A Multi-channel MAC Protocol with Multiple Channel Reservation for Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, a multi-channel MAC protocol, called M&M, with multiple channel reservation is proposed to tackle the channel conflict problem. M&M is fully distributed with no requirements of time synchronization or multi-radio, so it is very practical to implement M&M in resource-constrained sensor nodes. M&M can make nodes to choose one actually idle channel for communications from all assumed idle channels. Therefore, M&M can greatly alleviate, if not completely eliminate, packet collisions resulted by the channel conflict, and thus conserve more energy to prolong the lifetime of WSNs. To investigate the values of multiple channel reservation, extensive simulation and real test bed experiments are conducted. The results show that when the number of channels becomes larger or loads are heavy, M&M improves energy efficiency and throughput significantly.