DCAMP Project

DCAMP, abbreviated from MAC-BASED DYNAMIC CHANNEL ALLOCATION PROTOCOL FOR INFRASTRUCTURE WIRELESS LANs. DCAMP was part of my graduation project through my Bachelor study.

Since radio broadcasting has been born, various broadcasters and service providers were using the shared medium to an extent that they began to interfere with each others. When more than one user emits voice or data on the same frequency at the same time, collision occurs and sent data is lost. To solve the problem, the government in each country has organized and distributed the usage of the scarce medium between different broadcasters and service providers for several years. Despite of spectrum distribution between users, the heavy presence of wireless applications in every part of life reduces tremendously the availability of Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) band. Furthermore, the invention of new technologies such as WLANs, Bluetooth, Microwave devices..etc, make the channel allocation harder , especially in public places such as universities, hospitals, companies, and in crowded areas. This heavy reliance on wireless technologies force us to often work in an intensively contention environment and leads to a lot of throughput drawbacks and hence inconvenient for the users. Thus, dynamic spectrum allocation appeared as a new trend to share the scarce spectrum by different technologies based on real time availability of the channel.

Dynamic Channel Allocation idea concentrates around giving MAC protocols the intelligence ability to change the spectrum bandwidth automatically upon the status of the user’s current channel. This advantage eliminates the tedious manual frequency planning work, also it handles and utilizes the radio resources more efficiently. Dynamic Allocation allows the number of channels in a radio system to vary with the traffic load, hence increasing channel capacity with little costs.

Our project propose and implement a new MAC-Based Dynamic Channel Allocation Protocol for Infrastructure Wireless LANs(DCAMP). We deploy our protocol by dynamically assign channels to co-existing and nearby infrastructure wireless LANs in order to solve the congestion problems that could appear in networks where many technologies are being used independently in the same frequency band where a high rate of packet collision occurs, and increase the network throughput by giving senders the ability to change from congested channels to another with a less interference and avoid long backoff algorithms.

In order to implement our protocol, we modified a MADWIFI wireless driver by using linux kernel programming. Also we used Wireshark packet sniffing program, IPERF Network tester program and Linux networking commands to test the network and compare the improvements of the network.