Performance evaluation of modified IEEE 802.11 MAC for multi-channel multi-hop ad hoc network

Abstract

The IEEE 802.11 multiple access control protocol was modified for use in multi-channel, multi-hop ad hoc network, through the use of a new channel-status indicator. In particular, we have evaluated the improvement due to the multi-channel use. We report in this paper on the results of the throughput per node and the end-to-end delay for the modified IEEE 802.11 protocol for different network sizes. Using these results, we were able to propose a number of throughput scaling laws. Our simulation results show that the throughputs per node with multiple channels for the line and the grid ad hoc network topologies will increase by 47.89%, and by 1.39-163%, respectively, for networks with 16 to 64 nodes, as compared with that of single channel.