Traffic sensitive MAC algorithms in multihop radio networks

An exciting application of multihop packet radio networks (MPRNet) is to provide communication services in environments without a suitable infrastructure. One key design issue in MPRNet is the formulation of medium access control (MAC) protocols. The performance of two MAC protocols, slotted ALOHA (S-ALOHA) and spatial TDMA (S-TDMA), is investigated. In many MPRNet, the traffic load can vary considerably from link to link. We consider improving the network performance by incorporating traffic load information into the MAC protocol design. In S-ALOHA, nodes transmit at random with some specified probability q. By defining q in terms of traffic load and connectivity, near optimum performance is achieved. For S-TDMA, the design of transmission schedules is considered. A systematic procedure for generating schedules, based on connectivity, is described and this procedure is enhanced considerably by utilizing traffic load information. The resulting traffic-sensitive schedules markedly improve network performance