MAX: A Maximal Transmission Concurrency MAC for Wireless Networks with Regular Structure

Multi-hop wireless networks facilitate applications in metropolitan area broadband, home multimedia, surveillance and industrial control networks. Most applications require high end-to-end throughput and/or bounded delay. Current single-hop networks primarily employ random access link-layer protocols such as Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA). These perform poorly in the multi-hop regime and provide no end-to-end QoS guarantees. The primary causes are uncoordinated interference and unfairness in exclusive access of the shared wireless medium. Furthermore, random access schemes do not leverage spatial reuse effectively and require routes to be link-aware. MAX is a time division multiplexed resource allocation framework for multi-hop networks with practical architectures for node scheduling algorithms. MAX tiling delivers optimal end-to-end throughput across arbitrarily large regularly structured networks while maintaining bounded delay. It outperforms CSMA-based random access protocols by a factor of 5-to-8. The MAX approach provides network services including: flexible uplink and downlink bandwidth management, deterministic route admission control, and optimal gateway placement. MAX has being implemented on IEEE 802.15.3 embedded nodes and a test-bed of 50 nodes has been deployed both indoors and outdoors