A COMPARISON OF CHANNEL SCANNING SCHEMES FOR DISTRIBUTED NETWORK FORMATION AND RECONFIGURATION

A packet radio network (for example, wireless LAN, mobile tactical net work) consists of a number of nodes, each equipped with a transceiver, exchanging data packets via radio channels. In this paper we identify and discuss issues related to the process of forming a network in an automatic and distributed manner. During network initialisation and re configuration, the time to complete the network formation process is a n important performance parameter. We define two measures which can be used for computing the network formation time. Also, we present a com parative evaluation of two channel-scanning schemes (synchronous and a synchronous) for multiple frequency operations using a broadcast acces s scheme based on CSMA. Our study of networks with different spatial d istributions of nodes shows that the asynchronous scanning scheme perf orms better when the ratio of the number of 1-hop neighbours to the nu mber of available channels is high. Its performance is somewhat worse than that of the synchronous scheme for sparse networks. It is also se nsitive to changes in the channel dwell time of the receivers, compare d with the synchronous case.