SSCH is a promising technology. In our future work, we plan to investigate how SSCH will perform when implemented over actual hardware, and is subject to the normal environmental vagaries of wireless networks, such as unpredictable variations in signal strength. As part of this implementation effort, we also plan to evaluate how metrics reflecting environmental conditions, such as ETX [14], can be integrated into SSCH.
Our results in Section 4.3.3 show that existing routing protocols do not give the best performance over SSCH. In particular, we find that the time to discover a route can be quite large in a reactive routing protocol being run over SSCH. In the future, we plan to more thoroughly evaluate routing over SSCH (as opposed to classical single channel routing), and to explore a wider variety of proactive and hybrid routing protocols over SSCH.
There are at least four additional topics that would also need to be addressed before SSCH can be deployed. One is interoperability with nodes that are not running SSCH. Another is the evaluation of power consumption under this scheme. We have not attempted to evaluate the energy cost of switching channels, nor have we attempted to enable a power-saving strategy such as in the IEEE 802.11 specification for access-point mode. A third topic of investigation is the evaluation of SSCH in conjunction with auto-rate adaptation mechanisms. A fourth topic is a more detailed evaluation of the interplay between SSCH and TCP.