Spatial reuse in multihop packet radio networks

Multihop packet radio networks present many challenging problems to the network analyst and designer. The communication channel, which must be shared by all of the network users, is the critical system resource. In order to make efficient use of this shared resource, a variety of channel access protocols to promote organized sharing have been investigated. Sharing can occur in three domains: frequency, time, and space. This paper is mostly concerned with sharing and channel reuse in the spatial domain. A survey of results on approaches to topological design and associated channel access protocols that attempt to optimize system performance by spatial reuse of the communication channel is presented.