MAC-SCC: medium access control with a separate control channel for multihop wireless networks

The recent research has shown that the basic RTS/CTS approach is not efficient in multihop wireless networks. In this paper, we propose a novel medium access control protocol with a separate control channel (MAC-SCC). A distinct feature of MAC-SCC (compared with other multichannel MAC protocols) is to use two Network Allocation Vectors (NAVs) for the data channel and the control channel, respectively. The transmission of the next data frame can be pre-determined during the current transmission via the separate control channel, and thus the frame collision probability and bandwidth wasted during backoff can be reduced. The system throughput is quantified via simulation. The results show that MAC-SCC yields a throughput gain up to 60% under high traffic load and has a significant lower link failure probability.