Design and application of a many-to-one communication protocol

Abstract

In this paper, we address the fundamental problem of improving the performance of many-to-one and many-to-many communications. Our approach is Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) based but addresses the limitations of existing TDMA implementations in a novel way. In a nutshell, we combine packets from many senders into a single large packet transmission by exploiting capture effect achieved through fine grained power control at the level of segments within a single packet. We applied our technique to the design of a one-hop, many-to-one communication protocol, SyncMerge, and a multi-hop, many-to-many communication protocol, ByteCast. Our evaluation shows that SyncMerge is able to achieve 2 to 15 times improvement over traditional many-to-one communication schemes. In addition, ByteCast is able to disseminate 1 byte of data from every node to all other nodes in about 600 ms with 99.5% reliability on a 90 node testbed. Compared to the state-of-the-art protocols such as LWB and Chaos, ByteCast is able to reduce the radio-on time by up to 90% while achieving similar reliability. � 2017 IEEE.