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Dynamically organizes the network into two-hop clusters, which coordinate channel access and minimize interference.
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Brief Description The technology provides real-time packet broadcasting in a multihop radio network using a medium access control (MAC) protocol that combines advantageous features of both centralized and distributed networks for energy efficiency with high throughput. Applications This is for radio communication by a group carrying radios, such as a military unit, or a fire-fighter team. Advantages A novel clustering algorithm dynamically organizes the network into two-hop clusters, which coordinate channel access and minimize interference. Time is organized into cyclic superframes, which consist of several time frames, to support reservation-based periodic channel access for real-time traffic. Energy dissipation for receiving unwanted or collided data packets or for waiting in idle mode is avoided through the use of information summarization packets sent prior to the data transmissions by the source nodes. Extensions to network-wide and multicast/unicast broadcasting are under development. Simulations show that this "Multihop time reservation using adaptive control for energy efficiency" (MH-TRACE) protocol outperforms the existing distributed MAC protocol 802.11 and approaches the theoretical maximum throughput and theoretical minimum energy dissipation, showing that the coordinated MAC protocol's performance is superior to the performance of the non-coordinated MAC protocol even when error rates are high.