Joint Routing and Medium Access Control in Fixed Random Access Wireless Multihop Networks

The authors study cross-layer design in random access based fixed wireless multi-hop networks under a physical interference model. Due to the complexity of the problem, they consider a simple slotted ALOHA Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for link layer operation. They formulate a joint routing, access probability, and rate allocation optimization problem to determine the optimal max-min throughput of the flows and the optimal configuration of the routing, access probability, and transmission rate parameters in a slotted ALOHA system. They then also adapt this problem to include an XOR-like network coding without opportunistic listening. Both problems are complex non-linear and non-convex.