Multichannel ad hoc network based on 802.11 standard

The paper proposes a flexible solution to the scalability problem for the 802.11 based military ad hoc networks, which consists in using several frequency channels with different common power levels. By that the network can cover a larger area, and for a small area the amount of interference is reduced by power adjustment. The paper considers different algorithms for power adjustment and evaluates their performance for two channels and various coverage areas and numbers of nodes. Also performance evaluation of a single-channel network is given for comparison. The performance evaluation is done for the protocol model of medium access control. Performance of real-time streaming services is considered with delay and throughput as performance metric. The two-channel network with the proposed adaptive power selection algorithm gives a significant performance gain for the real-time services. This improvement justifies the increase in the amount of used resources