Many-to-one simultaneous communications in distributed wireless networks

One-to-one (unicast) and one-to-many (multicast and broadcast) communications are the communication scenarios that are widely investigated at the medium access control sub-layer in distributed wireless networks. Another communication scenario that receives much less attention in such networks is many-to-one communications. In distributed wireless networks, efficient and time-constrained many-to-one communications is needed in many applications and protocol designs but is a challenging topic at the medium access control sub-layer. This paper proposes a new scheme to address this topic and investigates some of the design issues associated with the proposed scheme.