Avoiding Redundant Channel Blocking in Cooperative Multi-Channel MAC Protocols through Virtual Topology Inferencing

The mechanism of channel allocation used in the medium access control (MAC) sub-layer for wireless devices in IEEE 802.11 standard is through a single MAC channel. The drawback with the single channel solution is when the number of nodes increases, the throughput is also reduced. However, using multiple channels solves this problem and increases channel utilisation efficiency, where channel allocations can be managed through distributed cooperative negotiations. Cooperation techniques of channel allocations have been investigated by T. Luo et al (asynchronous cooperative multi-channel MAC protocol (CAM-MAC)), which uses cooperative neighbour updating and vetoing techniques for channel selection. The technique allows nodes to efficiently select channels which in turn leads to higher network performance. However, using such cooperative technique can lead to "redundant channel blocking", which blocks certain nodes from using valid channels that are not in range with nodes using the same channel. In this paper, we propose a solution to mitigate this problem using virtual topology inferencing, where simulations have also been presented to validate the proposed solution.