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 simulation.
A possible solution to avert the problems of network synchronization and schedule construction is to use random media access control. If all the stations use the Aloha protocol, the contention parameter can be optimized to maximize proportional fairness as demonstrated in @cite_11 . The contention parameter regulates how aggressively an Aloha station contends for the medium. If the contention parameter is too aggressive, a large fraction of channel time is wasted in the form of collisions. If it is not aggressive enough, a large fraction of the channel time remains idle.
@cite_11
2083604420
Following the introduction of contention resolution diversity slotted ALOHA (CRDSA), a number of variants of the scheme have been proposed in literature. A major drawback of these slotted random access (RA) schemes is related to the need to keep slot synchronization among all transmitters. The volume of signaling generated to maintain transmitters' slot synchronization is impractical for large networks. In this paper, we describe in detail asynchronous contention resolution diversity ALOHA (ACRDA), which represents the evolution of the CRDSA RA scheme. ACRDA provides better throughput performance with reduced demodulator complexity and lower transmission latency than its predecessor while allowing truly asynchronous access to the shared medium. The performance of the ACRDA protocol is evaluated via mathematical analysis and computer simulations and is compared with that of CRDSA.