Assignment Strategies for Spatial Reuse TDMA

Spatial reuse TDMA has been proposed as an access scheme for multihop radio networks where real-time service guarantees are important. The idea is to increase capacity by letting several radio terminals use the same time slot when possible. A time slot can be shared when the radio units are geographically separated such that small interference is obtained. The transmission rights of the different users are described with a schedule. Unfortunately, due to the mobility of the users, this schedule must be constantly updated. In order to make this possible such updates must be made in parallel with only local information, i.e. distributed STDMA algorithms must be used. In this report we investigate and list the properties a distributed STDMA algorithm must have to be efficient in a military scenario. Furthermore, we study the already existing algorithms and see what methods they use to fulfil the properties we seek. We can conclude that none of the existing algorithms can easily be used to create a sufficiently efficient distributed STDMA algorithm. Of the algorithms we have described USAP is the most interesting but not even this algorithm have the properties that are necessary for reliable and efficient communication on the battlefield.