ASAND: Asynchronous Slot Assignment and Neighbor Discovery Protocol for Wireless Networks

Slot assignment is crucial for time-multiplexed channel access schemes. All existing approaches for slot assignment assume that the network nodes are synchronized with high precision, which is costly to maintain. This paper proposes a novel slot assignment protocol which does not rely on time synchronization among nodes in the network. As a byproduct, each node discovers its neighbors along with a local schedule of their channel access times, which is a crucial piece of information for many networking protocols.