Improving the Performance of Multi-channel Systems by Limiting Contention to the Control Channel

The use of multi-channels at the MAC layer is perceived to improve the capacity of wireless networks. However, there is a need for coordination and good scheduling algorithms in using the multi-channels without degrading the performance of the network. In this work, we seek to improve the performance of the multi-channel systems further by reducing the signaling overhead of the control channel. The reservation of data channels is linked to the reservation of the control channel. Nodes only contend for the control channel when a given data channel is known be idle through the implementation of the network support scheme. The scheme avoids a need for repeated attempts to reserve data channels to improve performance. Preliminary numerical results show that when data channels are reserved when they are idle, network performance can be improved. The utilization of the data channel should be limited to seventy-five percent for better performance to be achieved.