Medium access control layer protocol in a distributed environment

摘要

A method for allocating resources of a shared medium in a large distributed network. The nodes make reservation requests in parallel during a series of reservation time slots. For each slot, one node of a pair transmits a request and the other listens. A node transmits its own requests and the requests of nodes from the request it received. The process repeats until all nodes have transmitted their requests for medium access, wherein one node knows the medium access requests of all the nodes in the network. In this fashion, 1024 nodes can make their requests in ten time slots. The last node may be a master node or may transmit to a master node or base station, which transmits a full or partial grant. Alternatively, the nodes may simultaneously transmit their requests to a master node, which passes the groups requests to a master node nearer the base station.