Adaptive TDMA slot assignment in mesh wireless networks

From the channel assignment schemes in time division multiple access (TDMA) slot assignment protocols developed in previous studies, we have found that these protocols do not have a convenient frame length reduction scheme after the expansion of the frame length. As the network size grows, the frame length expands rapidly, particularly when we set it as a power of two. A very long frame may result in poor channel utilization when it contains many unused slots. In this paper, we consider a wireless mesh network with a TDMA structure. We divide each code into time slots to form the channels. We propose a dynamic frame length expansion and recovery method termed adaptive time slot assignment (ATSA). This strategy is designed to enhance the utilization of the available channels by taking advantage of the spatial reuse concept. In ATSA, an increase in spatial reuse is achieved by adding a certain amount of control overhead. We show that the bandwidth saved due to the channel spatial reuse is larger than the additional bandwidth spent on the control overhead.