On the efficiency of broadcasting in multi-channel multi-interface wireless networks

Speaker:

Xavier Franco

Date and Time:

January 27, 2011 - 10:30am - 10:50am

Presentation Abstract:

Wireless technologies, such as 802.11, that are used in ad hoc networks provide for multiple non-overlapping channels. In the last decade, many authors have showed the advantages of using multiple channels in ad hoc networks; specifically the available network capacity can be increased. New protocols for routing and MAC layer have been designed to exploit these advantages. Many of these protocols rely on the channel switching capability of the wireless radios to ensure network connectivity. In these kinds of protocols, when a node needs to perform broadcasting, it sends the packet over all the channels available, incurring a switching delay between transmissions on different channels and also introducing to the network a huge and unnecessary overhead. In this work we propose a simple probabilistic approach to perform broadcasting on multiple channels multiple interfaces wireless networks. Even though with a probabilistic approach, there exists some possibility that a broadcast packet is not received by all the nodes in the network, simulation results show us that our approach is sufficient to perform other tasks as neighbor discovering and route request propagation, whilst reducing considerably the overhead required by the simple solution of flooding over all the channels.