Slot allocation strategies for delay sensitive traffic support in asynchronous ad hoc wireless networks

Supporting real-time traffic in ad hoc wireless networks is considered as a challenging problem. Existing bandwidth reservation mechanisms assume a TDMA environment where achieving time synchronisation is expensive in terms of resources. Heuristics that exist for slot allocation schemes assume a CDMA over TDMA model in order to alleviate the presence of hidden terminals. Slot allocation strategies in the presence of hidden terminals assume significance in a single channel system for supporting delay sensitive traffic. In this paper, we propose three heuristics for the slot allocation process in asynchronou single channel multihop wireless networks in the presence of hidden terminals. The heuristics we propose are the early fit reservation (EFR), minimum bandwidth-based reservation (MBR) and position-based hybrid reservation (PHR). The EFR heuristic assigns bandwidth link-by-link in the forward path. The MBR heuristic allocates bandwidth to the links in the increasing order of free conn-slots. The PHR heuristic assigns bandwidth for every link proportional to its position in the path. Simulation studies show that EFR performs better in terms of delay characteristics. MBR provides better call blocking performance at the cost of high end-to-end delay. PHR provides a better delay performance compared to MBR and better call blocking performance comparedto EFR. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.