Decentralized power management in RF mesh networks for frequency reuse

The objective of this work is to develop power control techniques to allow frequency reuse of non-spread carrier frequencies within a RF mesh mobile topology. The HF automatic link establishment (ALE) system defined in MILSTD 188-141A is a procedure by which linking to a particular addressed radio can be done automatically in a group of congested HF channels. This is a distributed control algorithm to gain access of a free channel from a set of frequencies. When the radio want to call an address it will rank the channels for sequence of calling according to link quality analysis (LQA) scores. The basic procedure is to call only if that channel is silent. That channel is dedicated to only one party of users as long as they are busy. Two radios will go through the usual request to send (RTS), clear to send (CTS), and acknowledgment (ACK) to establish a link. The work reported here is to create a compatible algorithm that will reuse the busy channel whenever necessary. Note that in HF ALE protocol calls are only made to a channel if it is silent. Under power management situation an initiating radio may be far from a pair of radios using minimum (non-audible) power for linkage, it is necessary to use more information to decide on initiating a call on a channel even if the channel is silent. ALE radios use sounding periodically to keep up neighbor awareness.