On the distributed construction of a collision-free schedule in multi-hop packet radio networks

This paper introduces a protocol that distributively constructs a collision-free schedule for multi-hop packet radio networks in the presence of hidden terminals. As a preliminary step, each wireless station computes the schedule length after gathering information about the number of flows in its neighbourhood. Then, a combination of deterministic and random backoffs are used to reach a collision-free schedule. A deterministic backoff is used after successful transmissions and a random backoff is used otherwise. It is explained that the short acknowledgement control packets can easily result in channel time fragmentation and, to avoid this, the use of link layer delayed acknowledgements is advocated and implemented. The performance results show that a collision-free protocol easily outperforms a collision-prone protocol such as Aloha. The time that is required for the network to converge to a collision-free schedule is assessed by means of simulationThis work has been partially funded by the Spanish Government (grant TEC2008-0655) and the European Commission (grant CIP-ICT PSP-2011-5). The views expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not represent the views of the Spanish Government or the European Commission