Is Diversity Gain Worth the Pain: Performance Comparison Between Opportunistic Multi-Channel MAC and Single-Channel MAC

In this paper, the authors analyze the delay performance of an opportunistic multi-channel medium access control scheme and compare it to that of the corresponding single channel MAC scheme. In the opportunistic multi-channel MAC scheme, they assume that the pair of sender/receiver is able to evaluate the channel quality after a certain amount of channel sensing delay and to choose the best one for data communication. They consider three settings: an ideal scenario where no control channel is needed and no sensing delay is incurred, a more realistic scheme where users compete for access on a control channel using random access, and a scheme similar to but with a Time Division Multiplex (TDM) based access scheme on the control channel.