Deterministic rendezvous scheme in multichannel access networks

Abstract

In multichannel access networks, nodes must establish a link on a channel before data transmission begins. To find such a channel, either a centralised or a distributed approach may be employed. Presented is a distributed channel rendezvous scheme. The scheme determines the order, in which two nodes visit available channels to rendezvous within 2N + 1 slots, where N is the number of channels and a slot is the minimum interval required to establish a link between any pair of nodes that are in a common channel. More notably, the scheme can be implemented without slot synchronisation which is hard to accomplish in a distributed manner.