Performance analysis and saturation bound research of cyclic-quorum multichannel MAC protocol based on Markov chain model

Abstract

In high diversity node situation, single-channel MAC protocols suffer from many collisions. To solve this problem, the research of multichannel MAC protocol has become a hotspot. And the cyclic quorum-based multichannel (CQM) MAC protocol outperformed others owing to its high frequency utilization. In addition, it can avoid the bottleneck that others suffered from and can be easily realized with only one transceiver. To obtain the accurate performance of CQM MAC protocol, a Markov chain model, which combines the channel hopping strategy of CQM protocol and IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF), is proposed. The metrics (throughput and average packet transmission delay) are calculated in performance analysis, with respect to node number, packet rate, channel slot length and channel number. The results of numerical analysis show that the optimal performance of CQM protocol can be obtained in saturation bound situation. And then we obtain the saturation bound of CQM system by bird swarm algorithm (BSA). Finally, the Markov chain model and saturation bound are verified by Qualnet platform. And the simulation results show that the analytic and simulation results match very well.