Evaluating the impact of the signalling delay on the control channel

Multi-channel wireless communication techniques have positioned wireless access networks as strong candidates for the next generation networks. They promise to offer high capacity and better network performance. Unfortunately, multi-channel schemes come with a number of challenges. They operate under some hardware constraints, such as transmit-receive and channel switching delay. A transceiver can listen on one channel and can switch to other channels incurring a channel switching cost which degrades the performance of the network. The paper investigates the impact of the channel switching penalty on performance and it then discusses briefly our proposed model. The performance of the control channel is analyzed and its impact on performance is evaluated. Simulations and network queuing models are employed. The effect of channel switching delay is evaluated in different network sizes. The results show that the performance of the network can be improved by improving the capacity of the control channel and reducing signalling delays.