Despite recent advances in wireless local area network (WLAN) technologies, today's WLANs still cannot offer the same data rates as their wired counterparts. The throughput problem is further aggravated in multi-hop wireless environments due to collisions and interference caused by multi-hop routing. Because all current IEEE 802.11 physical (PHY) standards divide the available frequency into several orthogonal channels, which can be used simultaneously within a neighborhood, increasing capacity by exploiting multiple channels becomes particularly appealing. To improve the capacity of wireless ad hoc networks by exploiting multiple available channels, I propose three principles that facilitate the design of efficient distributed channel assignment protocols. Distributed channel assignment problems have been proven to be <i>NP</i>-complete and, thus, computationally intractable. Though being a subject of many years of research, distributed channel assignment remains a challenging problem. There exist only a few heuristic solutions, none of which is efficient, especially for the mobile ad hoc environment. However, protocols that implement the proposed design principles are shown to require fewer channels and exhibit significantly lower communication, computation, and storage complexity, compared with existing approaches. As examples, I present two such protocols that build on standard reactive and proactive routing protocols. In addition, I prove the correctness of the algorithms and derive an upper bound on the number of channels required to both resolve collisions and mitigate interference. A new multi-channel medium access control (MC-MAC) protocol is also proposed for multi-hop wireless ad hoc networks. MC-MAC is compatible with the IEEE 802.11 medium access control (MAC) standard and imposes the minimum system requirements among all existing multi-channel MAC protocols. In addition, simulation results show that even with only a single half-duplex transceiver, MC-MAC, by exploiting multiple channels, can offer up to a factor of four improvement in throughput over the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol. The reduction in delay is even more significant. Therefore, the MC-MAC protocol and the accompanying distributed channel assignment protocols constitute an effective solution to the aforementioned performance problem in a multi-hop wireless network. Finally, I generalize the cross-layer design principle to more general networking functions and present a network architecture to motivate and facilitate cross-layer designs in wireless networks. A literature survey is provided to validate the proposed cross-layer design architecture. Current cross-layer design research can be categorized into two classes: joint-layer design using optimization techniques, and adaptive techniques based on system-profile and/or QoS requirements. Joint-layer design based on optimization techniques can achieve optimal performance, but at the expense of complexity. Adaptive schemes may achieve relatively good performance with less complexity. Nevertheless, without careful design and a holistic view of the network architecture, adaptive schemes may actually cause more damage than benefit. / Ph. D.

L’émergence de l’Internet des Objets révolutionne les réseaux locaux sans fil et inspirent de nombreuses applications. L’une des problématiques majeures pour les réseaux locaux sans fil est l’accès et le partage du médium radio sans fil. Plusieurs protocoles MAC mono-canal ont été proposés et abordent cette problématique avec des solutions intéressantes. Néanmoins, certains problèmes majeurs liés à l’accès au canal (nœud caché, synchronisation, propagation des RDV…) pour un contexte de transmission multi-saut, persistent encore et font toujours l’objet d’intenses études de la communauté scientifique, surtout lorsqu’il s’agit de réseaux de capteurs sans fil distribués sur des topologies étendues. Certains travaux de recherches ont proposé des protocoles MAC multi-canal, traitant souvent le cas idéal, où tous les nœuds dans le réseau sont à portée les uns des autres. Les émissions et réceptions des trames de données sont généralement précédées de trames des contrôles pour l’établissement de Rendez-vous (RDV) entre les nœuds concernés. Nous constatons que les RDV ne garantissent pas la réservation des canaux de façon déterministe sans conflit entre les nœuds dans le réseau, et peuvent rendre difficile les transmissions en multi-saut. Une solution complexe serait de propager ces RDV vers les voisins du nœud récepteur au-delà de 2 sauts. C’est face à cette complexité de gestion de RDV multi-sauts que s’inscrit notre contribution. Il s’agit pour nous de proposer une méthode d’accès multi-canal aléatoire sans RDV, en topologie multi-saut. Notre solution est implémentée sur un testbedréel constitué de nœuds WiNo mono-interface, elle est basée sur la méthode ALOHA slottée améliorée pour notre contexte multi-canal, dont nous évaluons les performances qui sont comparées au cas mono-canal. Un modèle analytique lié au contexte multi-canal sans RDV a été développé également, et comparé aux résultats de notre testbed. / The emergence of the Internet of Thingsrevolutionizeswireless local area networks and inspiringnumerous applications. One of the main issues for wirelessLANsis the access and sharing of the wireless radio medium. Several single-channel MAC protocols have been proposed and addressthis issue withinteresting solutions. However, some major problemsrelated to the channelaccess (hiddennode, synchronization, propagation of RDV) for a multi-hop transmission context, persist and are still the subject of intensive studies by the scientificcommunity, especiallywhenitcomes to a distributedwirelesssensors networks over extended topologies. Someresearch has proposed multi-channel MAC protocols, oftenaddressingthe ideal case, where all nodes in the network are within range of eachother. The transmissions and receptions of the data frames aregenerallypreceded by controls frames for the establishment of Rendez-Vous (RDV) among the nodesconcerned. Wefindthat the RDVs do not guarantee the channelsreservation in a deterministicwaywithoutconflictamong the nodes in the network, and maymakeitdifficult the multi-hop transmissions. A complex solution wouldbe to propagatetheseRDVs to the neighbors of the receivernodebeyond 2 hops. Facedwiththiscomplexity of multi-hop RDV management thatmakesour contribution. It is important for us to propose arandom multi-channelaccessmethodwithout RDV, in multi-hop topology. Our solution isimplemented on a real testbed made of multi-channel single-interface “WiNo” nodes, of whichweevaluate the performance that are compared to the single-channel case. An analytical model related to the multi-channelcontextwithout RDV wasalsodeveloped, and compared to the results of ourtestbed.