A hybrid randomized initialization protocol for TDMA in single-hop wireless networks

Although collision free TDMA schemes have been proposed and used for more than two decades, an important ingredient of these schemes, the initialization of stations (that is, assigning ID numbers 1,2,...,n) was not investigated until recently. Binary and n-ary partitioning algorithms were recently proposed for the case of stations with collision detection capability. The main contribution of this paper is a new randomized hybrid initialization protocol which combines the two partitioning algorithms into a more efficient one. The new scheme optimizes the binary partition protocol for small values of n (e.g. n=2, 3, 4). The hybrid scheme then applies n-ary partition protocol on the whole set, followed by binary partition on the stations that caused collision. We proved analytically that the expected number of time slots in the hybrid algorithm with known number of users is <2.20? n. Performance of these algorithms was also evaluated experimentally by comparing it with existing algorithms, and an improvement from e? n to approximately 2.15? n was obtained.