Protocols for media access control and power control in wireless networks

We present two protocols for ad hoc wireless networks, one for media access control, the other for power control. For the media access control problem we present a protocol called SEEDEX, which does not explicitly make reservations for packets yet allows scheduling to minimize conflicts. The idea is to use known finite state machines at nodes which are driven by pseudo-random number generators. The seeds of these pseudo-random number generators are exchanged between nodes in a two hop neighborhood. For the power control problem we first provide a framework for conceptualizing the problem. This leads us to propose a network layer approach to power control which consists of finding the least common network wide power level at which all nodes are connected. This can be shown to maximize the throughput traffic carrying capacity of the network. We then propose a feedback algorithm COMPOW which tunes to this minimum power level adaptively. We also propose a software architecture for integrating this into the OSI protocol stack