A Survey on Multiple Channel protocols for Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

Wireless ad hoc networks often suffer from rapidly degrading performance with the number of user increases in the network. One of the major reasons for this rapid degradation of performance is the fact that users are sharing a single channel. Obviously, the problem of using single shared channel schemes is that the probability of collision increases with the number of nodes. Fortunately, it is possible to solve this problem with multi-channel approaches. Due to the especial properties of multiple channels, using the multiple channels is more efficient than single channel because it enhances the capacity of the channel and reduces the error rate during data transmission. Some multi-channel schemes us one dedicated channel for control packets and one separate channel for data transmissions. On the other hand, another protocols use more than two channels for data transmissions. This paper summarizes six multiple channel protocols based on these two kinds of schemes. Then we compare them and discuss the research challenge of multiple channel protocols.