SIREN: Eliminating Multiple Access Interference in Transmission Schedules Established in Multi-Hop Networks

The Scheduling with Interference Removal Established Network-Wide (SIREN) protocol is introduced to enable the scheduling of transmissions in a way that multiple access interference (MAI) is eliminated in multi-hop networks. Unlike all prior medium access control (MAC) methods, SIREN combats MAI as a network-wide problem rather than as a problem confined within a single broadcast link. SIREN ensures that the receivers of a primary transmitter assigned a transmission turn have no MAI, and allow one or multiple concurrent secondary transmitters to transmit during the same transmission turn, as long as no MAI is created. SIREN is implemented on top of the IEEE 802.11b physical layer to show that it is a viable approach using commercial off-the-shelf hardware. SIREN is proven to ensure interference-free transmission schedules in mesh networks, and simulation experiments in ns-3 are used to illustrate the advantages of SIREN over IEEE 802.11b in terms of goodput, fairness and delays.