Spatially Limited Contention for Multi-Hop Wireless Networks

With rapid developments in the community mesh networks and wireless sensor networks research, the need for more efficient channel access techniques for multi-hop wireless networks has become eminent. In this work, we propose a novel hybrid channel access scheme that spatially limits the contention in the network such that 2-hop neighbors access the channel contention-free among each other whereas only the immediate neighbors may contend among each other. The contention among neighbors can be handled much more efficiently by a basic CSMA protocol as if operating in a single-hop network. We provide a general framework for the SLICON scheme and compare its performance to the conventional RTS/CTS-based collision avoidance scheme. By a case study using the IEEE 802.11 protocol as the underlying CSMA protocol, the proposed scheme pleads itself as a more efficient alternative to the RTS/CTS based collision avoidance scheme for large and dense multi-hop ad hoc networks with stationary nodes, such as wireless mesh and sensor networks.