Opportunistic Spectrum Allocation in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

One of the major challenges in mobile ad hoc networks is the management of spectrum exploitation. In the infrastructure based networks, base stations act as central management units. Hence, the spectrum allocation can be done in such central station and the decision is sent to mobile terminals. Terminals exploit the allocated bandwidth leading to more efficient spectrum usage. A different scenario occurs in mobile ad hoc networks since there is no central station to perform intelligent decision making. Each terminal has to act as both a network host for transmitting and receiving data and router forwarding packets to the destination node located outside the transmission range of the source node. With this restriction, current WLAN based ad hoc networks operate on a single channel although there are three non-overlapping channels for 802.11b/g and twelve non-overlapping channels for 802.11a.