A Reservation Protocol Analysis for Multi-Channel Wireless Networks

Abstract

A synchronous multi-channel multi-access Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) is studied in this paper. The proposed protocol introduces an access control reservation scheme and requires a single radio per station. The receiver collisions phenomenon characterizes the performance of the proposed multi-channel system. A priority scheme is considered in order to primary serve the time-sensitive traffic such as voice, as compared to the delay tolerant data traffic. The innovation of this paper is the extensive and accurate study of the receiver collisions effect on the network performance in multi-traffic environment. An analytic discrete time Markovian model is developed for finite number of stations and channels. The performance measures of throughput, delay, and average rejection probability at destination are analytically estimated. Numerical results are presented for comparison for various numbers of channels and stations. The proposed MAC protocol provides a substantial contribution to the understanding of wireless multi-channel multi-traffic environments.

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