Combined routing and scheduling for spatial TDMA in multihop ad hoc networks

Spatial time division multiple access (STDMA) is a conflict free MAC protocol for multihop ad hoc networks where links or nodes are scheduled to transmit in periodic slots. The paper analyzes the performance of a novel routing and scheduling strategy to create the schedule in STDMA. It is named reuse adaptive minimum hop algorithm (RA-MHA). RA-MHA uses the set of minimum hop paths between sources and destinations as well as previously suggested schedule strategies in order to assign link transmissions. The results show that when directional antenna patterns are used, RA-MHA produces a substantial improvement in throughput and packet delay.