Experimental comparison of blind rendezvous algorithms for tactical networks

We examine the problem of spectrally agile radios executing blind rendezvous over a set of communication channels using a GNU radio testbed. The performances of the Modified Modular Clock (MMC) and random channel access (RA) algorithms are compared across channel configurations that tactical radios will likely face. We assume no pre-coordinated channel indexing, no knowledge of the set or number of other nodes´ accessible channels, and no control-channel. We find that the MMC algorithm generally outperforms RA modestly in terms of average rendezvous time and substantially in terms of worst-case rendezvous time. We also find that asynchronization can reduce the time to rendezvous, and we describe a framework for optimizing the timeout choices of the MMC algorithm.