AMNP: Ad hoc multichannel negotiation protocol with broadcast solutions for multi-hop mobile wireless networks

A multi-hop mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is generally configured as a peer-to-peer network with no centralised hubs or controllers that coordinate channel resources. Nodes in a MANET usually equip one single transceiver for data transmissions. However, the single transceiver architecture will cause a difficulty of being implemented in multichannel environment if the network transmission capacity would be improved by adopting parallel multichannel access. To solve this thorny problem, this study presents a distributed medium access control (MAC) layer protocol called ad hoc multichannel negotiation protocol (AMNP) for multichannel transmissions in the multi-hop MANET. Additionally, two problems, the multichannel hidden terminal problem and the multichannel broadcast transmission problem, caused by single transceiver operations in the multichannel environment, which have not been revealed in academia, is presented and solved in this study. Finally, an enhanced AMNP with channel scheduling (AMNP/s) scheme is introduced to improve the channel utilisation. The author show, via simulations, that AMNP/s provides a higher throughput compared to its single-channel counterpart by promoting simultaneous transmissions in different channels. Simulation results also show that AMNP/s derives higher performance than other multichannel transmission schemes that use multiple transceivers.