Block design multichannel MAC protocol for WSNs

In this paper, we aim at reducing the problems related to the use of a single channel by designing a multichannel protocol that allows interference mitigation, delay and collision reduction, as well as throughput improvement while still reducing idle listening through a receiver-based scheduling of communication slots. We design our protocol in a fully distributed way so that failure of nodes or links could be recovered by local message exchange. To achieve these features, we make use of combinatorial block design theory. Block Design is a system of subsets of a finite set which satisfies certain conditions related to the frequency of appearance of pairs of elements of the set in the subsets of the system. Our proposed solution increases the throughput, and completely eliminates the deafness problem without causing a large overhead. To validate our solution on large scale networks, we developed our proposal on ns3, which has improved features over traditional simulators. Simulation results show that our Latin Square based channel assignment significantly reduces collisions and end to end delay thereby making it suitable for most sensor network applications.