Neighborhood Discovery and Activity Monitoring in Multichannel Mesh Networks

Multichannel approaches seem a promising way to improve the throughput in wireless mesh networks. However, the mesh network must continuously self-adapt to radio and topology changes. Thus, we propose here what constitutes, to the best of our knowledge, the first neighborhood discovery protocol to cope with multichannel environments, taking into account the deafness problem. We provide a theoretical analysis to give the average discovery time of any pair of neighbors. We also propose to take benefit from this neighborhood discovery to continually monitor the activity on every channel. We applied this integrated solution to Molecular MAC, a multichannel MAC approach, and proved that a simple channel assignment scheme based on this activity measurement is efficient.