Distributed Resource Reservation for Beacon Based MAC Protocols

Overview & Synopsis

Wireless connected devices become increasingly popular in a large variety of applications. Consumer electronics most certainly is the field with the most wireless innovations in the past years; but also other areas, such as medical equipment, vehicular on-board networks or maintenance services, experience an increasing demand for wireless communication. Additionally the networks should just work and require as little maintenance as possible. Hence future WLAN and WPAN must be self-configuring, self-healing and distributed to provide flexible usage. Assuming a homogeneous distributed MAC protocol with a beacon based reservation mechanism, a radio resource reservation algorithm is developed to fulfil the delay and data rate requirements from the devices. It uses a game theoretic approach to achieve infrastructure-less design and still provides fair resource allocation. Changes in the radio channel, failing devices or links and mobile nodes are detected and a reorganisation of resources is calculated.