Multichannel MAC for Wireless Sensor Network applications

Wireless Sensor Network is one of the major areas in wireless communications which extend its application in military, security, internet and scientific purposes. For a network which has dynamically varying channel gain and random topology, selection of operating parameters which improves network performance is always a challenging task. Single channel MAC is generally used in statistical analysis, but providing multi channel MAC will improve the performance of the channel. Multichannel is available in 802.11b/g which operates at 3 different non overlapping channels. In this paper we implemented 802.11g multichannel MAC using NS-2.34 and compared the performance of the network with single channel MAC in terms of throughput, packet delivery ratio and throughput. The multichannel uses back off algorithm and switches between the 3 non overlapping channels whenever the contention window of distributed coordination function reaches the maximum threshold value and thus gives better performance.