In this paper a unified approach to Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) slot assignment and to distributed routing in multi-hop packet radio networks is proposed. Dynamic reservation protocols for TDMA based wireless networks provide network connectivity information that can be used to build a distributed routing mechanism able to respond to changes in the network topology due to node mobility. In TDMA reservation protocols such as the one described here, time is divided into frames and frames into slots. A portion of these slots is used to broadcast a sufficient number of reservation requests. The essence of this type of protocol is to provide each node with enough information about slot usage in its neighborhood (up to two hops away) so it can efficiently choose a slot for transmission. However, this type of information can be used not only to implement the TDMA slot assignment but also to build routing tables. This kind of "unified" approach violates the "separation of layers" between the media access layer (TDMA slot assignment) and the network layer (the routing protocol) in exchange for a more efficient use of the bandwidth and a more rapid response to changes in the network topology.
展开▼
