MH-TRACE: multihop time reservation using adaptive control for energy efficiency

Multihop time reservation using adaptive control for energy efficiency (MH-TRACE) is a distributed MAC protocol for energy efficient real-time packet broadcasting in a multihop radio network. In MH-TRACE, the network is dynamically partitioned into clusters without using any global information except global clock synchronization. The clustering algorithm is simple and robust enough to ensure that the gain from clustering is much higher than the clustering overhead, even in the presence of node mobility. In MH-TRACE, time is organized into superframes, which consist of several time frames. Each cluster chooses a frame for transmitting control packets and for the transmission of data from nodes in the cluster. However, each node in the network can receive all the desired packets in its receive range without any restriction based on the formed clusters. Each node learns about future data transmissions in its receive range from information summarization (IS) packets sent prior to data transmission by each transmitting node. Therefore, each node creates its own listening cluster and receives the packets it wants. By avoiding energy dissipation for receiving unwanted data packets or for waiting in idle mode, MH-TRACE guarantees the network to be highly energy efficient. Furthermore, since data transmission is contention free, the throughput of MH-TRACE is better than the throughput of CSMA type protocols under high traffic loads.