Currently, most wireless sensor network applications assume the presence of single-channel Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols. When sensor nodes are densely deployed, single-channel MAC protocols may be inadequate due to the higher demand for the limited bandwidth. To overcome this drawback, we propose multiple channel support for improving the performance. Our method allows the nodes to utilize new frequency channels which results in the significant increase on the number of nodes that are granted access to the wireless medium. The method requires only one half-duplex transceiver per node, which is capable of sending and receiving over distinguished frequency channels. Simulation results show that, method successfully utilizes multiple channels and increases the performance proportional to the number of available frequencies for an example single-channel MAC protocol, LMAC. 1 We define the neighborhood of a node as the set of nodes which are located within the node's transmission range. We consider a dense network where a node -on the average-has more than 50 nodes in its neighborhood.
To overcome the deficiency of single-channel LMAC protocol in dense networks, Multi-channel Lightweight Medium Access Control (MLMAC) REF has been proposed.
Multi-channel support for dense wireless sensor networking
EuroSSC
Computer Science