A multichannel CSMA MAC protocol for multihop wireless networks

We describe a new carrier-sense multiple access (CSMA) protocol for multihop wireless networks, sometimes also called ad hoc networks. The CSMA protocol divides the available bandwidth into several channels and selects an idle channel randomly for packet transmission. It also employs a notion of "soft" channel reservation as it gives preference to the channel that was used for the last successful transmission. We show via simulations that this multichannel CSMA protocol provides a higher throughput compared to its single channel counterpart by reducing the packet loss due to collisions. We also show that the use of channel reservation provides better performance than multichannel CSMA with purely random idle channel selection.