Coloring-Based Resource Allocations in Ad-Hoc Wireless Networks

It is well known that CSMA/CA protocols exhibit very poor performance in case of multi-hop transmissions, because of inter-link interference due to imperfect carrier sensing. The authors propose to control such an interference by pre-allocating temporal slots in which different sets of network nodes are allowed to contend for the channel access. The approach is based on distributed coloring algorithms with limited signaling overhead that can be customized as a function of the network topology and traffic load.