A distributed medium access control scheme for a large network of wireless routers

The throughput of a large network of wireless routers critically depends on the design of distributed medium access control (MAC). In this paper, a distributed MAC scheme called opportunistic synchronous array method (SAM) is presented and analyzed. The opportunistic SAM combines multiuser diversity and interference suppression in a distributed fashion. Depending on the choice of two control parameters, the opportunistic SAM may reduce to three specializations: multiuser SAM, switching SAM or deterministic SAM. The network throughput of the opportunistic SAM is analyzed, and its throughput gain over its specializations is illustrated.