Comparing Adaptive TDMA against a Clock Synchronization Approach

Teams of cooperating robots are getting more popular fostered by hardware platforms as well as technologies and techniques for coordination that are becoming widely available. The wireless communication is one such technology that impacts directly on the quality provided by the cooperative applications running atop. In cases where the team robots transmit periodically, it has been shown that synchronizing their transmissions so that they occur out of phase is beneficial, e.g. in a TDMA manner. However, persisting periodic interfering traffic may increase collisions with the team traffic and thus downgrade the channel quality. The Adaptive TDMA self-synchronized protocol was then proposed to improve the resilience to this type of interference. In this paper we assess the effectiveness of Adaptive TDMA in comparison with a traditional TDMA implementation based on clock synchronization. The results of practical experiments show a reduction in packet losses when the interfering traffic is short, typically single packet.