Conflict-Resolution Procedures in Short-Range Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

The ad hoc networks are rapidly deployed and maintained by the self-organizing actions of the participating devices. The overall performance of many envisioned applications in pervasive computing will heavily rely on the promptness of the self-configuring network procedures. In addition, the devices in ad hoc networks are battery-powered, which makes the energy a scarce resource; therefore, all self-configuring actions should be performed under a condition of minimized power consumption. The self-configuring actions are executed over a shared medium, which can be a single channel or a set of channels. This gives rise to specific types of conflict that are of transient nature and thereby different from the problems resolved by traditional MAC protocols, which consider the conflict to be an ongoing phenomenon. Within this project, we have proposed an algorithm for resolution of conflict of unknown multiplicity and the algorithm is optimized both in terms of time and message complexity. We are currently investigating how to embed the conflict-resolution procedures into a distributed algorithm used for self-assembly of an ad hoc network. This project is a part of the Ph. D. project of Petar Popovski. (Petar Popovski and Ramjee Prasad)