A Multi-Band Random Access Messaging Protocol

Media access protocols can be classified as either demand assigned or random access. Demand assigned protocols are often inflexible, inefficient under diverse traffic, and do not scale well to large networks. Random access schemes usually suffer from collisions and cannot manage the multi-frequency capabilities of many radios. We present new results on our pseudorandom message scheduling approach. The protocol has been extended to manage multiple frequency channels. In dense networks, sub-networking can be performed. Nodes are partitioned a priori and are assigned different reference frequencies for their discovery/broadcast segments. We demonstrate in networks where nodes use transmission based start times along with conventional carrier sense channel access, collision free communications.