Recent research eorts on multi-hop wireless networks are motivated and driven
by two important phenomena: an ever increasing demand for ubiquitous access to
online information and services, and a strong desire and need to capture and analyze
data from physical phenomena surrounding us in our daily lives. The rst of the two
constitutes an inspiration for wireless mesh networks, as the latter does for wireless
sensor networks.
In this thesis, we address the energy-ecient media access control (MAC)
and routing issues on multi-hop wireless networks. Our major contributions are
threefold. First, we propose a set of contention-free MAC protocols that do not rely
on global time synchronization and that are possessed of the desired characteristics
of a multi-hop wireless network protocol; i.e. they are energy-saving, distributed,
and self-stabilizing. Our protocols attest that distributed and asynchronous slot
assignment with reasonable frame sizes and throughput is possible in multi-hop
wireless networks.
Second, we present the rst routing protocols that -to the best of our knowledgeimprove
the QoS level of Spatial TDMA (STDMA) MAC protocols by eectively
decreasing the end-to-end delay in wireless sensor and mesh networks. In large
multi-hop wireless networks, where data is routed over several hops, the end-toend
latency may be signicantly large, especially when a reservation-based channel
access protocol is used. We show that by exploiting the relative timing of nodes'
slots in the underlying STDMA protocol, signicant performance gain is possible
compared to the shortest-hop based conventional routing approaches.
Third, we propose a general framework for a new hybrid media access scheme
based on the idea of spatially limiting the contention in multi-hop wireless networks.
The channel assignment component of the hybrid access scheme employs a novel
approach for carefully selecting the set of contending nodes such that the hidden
terminals are completely eliminated. Hence, in the contention-based component of
the hybrid access scheme, only the spatially close (neighbor) nodes contend for the
channel as if in a single-hop network, which can be handled much more eciently by
a carrier-sense multiple access (CSMA) scheme. In order to assess the performance
of the proposed scheme under dierent network conditions, we provide and utilize a
general framework for the formal analysis of CSMA and CSMA/CA (collision avoidance)
schemes for multi-hop wireless networks, which can capture under-saturation
trac loads unlike prior work. |