Multichannel time-spread scheduling: a new approach to handling heavy traffic loads in ad hoc networks

Wireless mobile networks that do not have infrastructure or centralized administration, known as the ad hoc networks, have received considerable attention in the last few years. The salient characteristics of such networks - time-varying topology and lack of centralized control design - have made medium access control design more complicated and challenging, which is particularly when multiple channels are employed. Recently, many multichannel transmission protocols, such as collision-avoidance transmission scheduling (CATS), have been investigated for their higher efficiency although their problems are abundant. In this paper, we propose a new protocol, namely, multichannel time-spread scheduling (MATS), to improve the throughput performance under heavy traffic loads. In MATS, nodes with transmission requests are divided into three groups, and carry out channel reservations in parallel with a short overhead. We carry out simulation study and the results show that the performance of this protocol under high traffic loads is significantly improved.