We design and implement Soft-TDMAC, a software Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) based MAC protocol, running over commodity 802.11 hardware. Soft-TDMAC has a synchronization mechanism, which synchronizes all pairs of network clocks to within microseconds of each other. Building on pairwise synchronization, Soft-TDMAC achieves network wide synchronization. With, out-of-band, network wide synchronization Soft-TDMAC can schedule arbitrary TDMA transmission patterns.
We summarize hundreds of hours of testing Soft-TDMAC on a multi-hop testbed. Our experimental results show that Soft-TDMAC synchronizes multi-hop networks to within a few microsecond sized TDMA slots. Soft-TDMAC can schedule transmissions to take end-to-end demands into account and in a way that decreases end-to-end delay [1], [2]. With no collisions, under good channel conditions, TCP achieves almost the full wireless channel bandwidth.
We study the problem of using path diversification to provide low probability of packet loss (PPL) in wireless networks. Path diversification uses erasure codes and multiple paths in the network to transmit packets. The source uses Forward Error Correction (FEC) to encode each packet into multiple fragments and transmits the fragments to the destination using multiple disjoint paths. The source uses a load balancing algorithm to determine how many fragments should be transmitted on each path. The destination can reconstruct the packet if it receives a number of fragments equal to or higher than the number of fragments in the original packet.We study the load balancing algorithm in two general cases. In the first case, we assume that no knowledge of the performance along the paths is available at the source. In such a case, the source decomposes traffic uniformly among the paths; we call this case blind load balancing. We show that for low PPL, blind load balancing outperforms single-path transmission. In the second case, we assume that a feedback mechanism periodically provides the source with information about the performance along each path. With that information, the source can optimally distribute the fragments. We show how to distribute the fragments for minimized PPL, and maximized efficiency given a bound on PPL. We evaluate the performance of the scheme through numerical simulations.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.