Multi-channel OLSR with a Dedicated Control Interface

Most Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) research is based on a single channel. Nonetheless, multi-channel is an approach that can increase network capacity by transmitting traffic on different channels in an interference area. Channel assignment and channel switching, however, are two main challenges when the common communication channel is no longer available using the multi-channel scheme. We propose to separate the control and the data traffic on different interfaces of a node. The dedicated control interface of all nodes share a common channel for routing and multi-channel control. The data interface, on the other hand, uses multiple channels for data traffic. This separation makes both control and data traffic efficient. We extended the OLSR (Optimized Link State Routing) protocol to support a simple channel assignment mechanism and improved the queue-based channel switching scheme. Simulation results with NS-2 indicate significant performance improvement on throughput and end-