Abstract
Numerous multi-channel MAC protocols have been studied in the past decade. With the concerns of hardware cost and device capability, many researchers have proposed protocols that utilize only single transceiver even though the network with multiple transceivers can potentially have higher capacity than a network with a single transceiver. In this paper, we introduce a novel cooperative multi-channel MAC protocol that incorporates the notion of cooperative communication into the multi-channel MAC protocols which utilize single transceiver to satisfy multiple transceivers requirement. The proposed protocol is designed based on the well-known multi-channel protocol SSCH, and requires only one transceiver per device. Hence, under the IEEE 802.11 multi-channel multi-hop wireless network environment, we design a relay node selection approach to select a relay node and let an intermediate node become a virtual node with the relay node. We also design a channel assignment mechanism to let the virtual node transmit and receive data simultaneously on different channels for improving the network performance. Simulation results show that our protocol significantly outperforms the original SSCH in terms of network capacity and average packet delay.