A NODE ARBITRATED MEDIA ACCESS CONTROL PROTOCOL FOR AD HOC BROADCAST NETWORKS CARRYING EPHEMERAL INFORMATION

摘要

Techniques for organizing nodes of an ad hoc broadcast network into sets and employing the sets to arbitrate access by the nodes to a shared communications medium. Each node has a copy of a signal library and the node indicates its membership in the set by associating itself with a signal in the library. In one application, the signals are ranked, the set is a queue, and the node's position in the queue is indicated by the rank of the signal associated with the node. Each node has rules for selecting the next signal. The hidden terminal problem is solved by having each node broadcast its tone and all of the other tones it has heard. The techniques are particularly useful for the broadcast of ephemeral information by the nodes.