Energy-Efficient Strategy For Cooperative Multi-Channel MAC Protocols

Medium access control (MAC) protocols have been studied under different contexts for several years now. In all these MAC protocols, nodes make independent decisions on when to transmit a packet and when to back-off from transmission. In this paper, we introduce the notion of node cooperation into MAC protocols. Cooperation adds a new degree of freedom which has not been explored before. Our join Distributed Information SHaring (DISH) is a new join approach to designing Different channel MAC protocols. It aids nodes in their decision making processes by compensating for their missing information via information sharing through other neighboring nodes. This approach was recently shown to significantly boost the throughput of Different-channel MAC protocols. However, a critical issue for ad hoc communication devices, i.e., power efficiency, has yet to be addressed. In this paper, we address this issue by developing simple solutions which We compare five protocols with respect to the strategy and identify Unselfish DISH to be the right choice in general: (1) Conserves 4080% of power, (2) Maintains the throughput advantage gained from the DISH approach,(3) More than doubles the price efficiency compared to protocols without applying the strategy. On the other hand, our study shows that in-situ power conscious DISH is suitable only in certain limited scenarios. asynchronous Different-channel MAC protocol (CAM-MAC) is extremely simple to implement and, unlike other Different-channel MAC protocols, is naturally asynchronous.