Spatially Limited Contention for Multi-Hop Wireless Networks

With rapid developments in the community mesh networks and wireless sensor networks research, the need for more efficient channel access techniques for multi-hop wireless networks has become eminent. In this paper, the authors propose a novel hybrid channel access scheme that spatially limits the contention in the network such that 2-hop neighbors access the channel contention-free among each other whereas only the immediate neighbors may contend among each other. The contention among neighbors can be handled much more efficiently by a basic CSMA protocol as if operating in a single-hop network. They provide a general framework for the SLICON scheme and compare its performance to the conventional RTS/CTS-based collision avoidance scheme.