Capacity Optimization in TDMA Ad-Hoc Networks

Many scheduling techniques have been developed to solve the problem of sharing the common channel to multiple stations. TDMA has been increasingly used as a scheduling technique in ad-hoc networks. The current trend for QoS capable applications led to the deployment of numerous routing schemes that use TDMA. These schemes try to solve the problem of distributing the available slots among the wireless nodes and at the same time, to find paths within the network that fulfill some QoS related limitations, such as end-to-end delay. The exact way the slots are distributed among the transmitting nodes has an impact on the end-to-end delay and other performance parameters of the network, such as capacity. Therefore, the efficiency of the scheduling algorithms is closely related to the network topologies. In this paper, we propose two new end-to-end TDMA scheduling algorithms that try to enhance the network capacity by increasing the number of concurrent connections established in the network, without causing additional end-to-end delay. We study the efficiency of the proposed algorithms, when applied on various random topologies, and compare them in terms of end-to-end delay and network capacity.