A Distributed Control Scheme in Multi-hop Packet Radio Networks for Voice/Data Traffic Support†

The paper presents a self-organizing, multihop packet radio network architecture for multimedia. This architecture relies on code division access scheme. Nodes are organized into subsets called clusters. Within a cluster, any two nodes are one hop away from each other. All links in a cluster are assigned a common spread-spectrum code. Channel access in a cluster is implemented using a round robin scheme for data traffic and a piggyback scheme with bandwidth reservation for real time traffic. At call setup time, this architecture constructs virtual circuits and allocates bandwidth to each real time session. This multicluster architecture provides a good spatial reuse of the bandwidth. Since none of the nodes need to keep accurate common time, it eliminates the overhead of a global clock or time synchronization mechanism.