A disruption-resistant MAC layer for multichannel wireless networks

Abstract

Wireless networking occurs on a shared medium which renders communication vulnerable to disruption from other networks, environmental interference, and even malicious jammers. The standard solution to this problem is to deploy coordinated spread spectrum technologies that require pre-shared secrets between communicating devices. These secrets can be used to coordinate hopping patterns or spreading sequences. In this paper, by contrast, we study the local broadcast and unicast problems in a disrupted multichannel network with no pre-shared secrets between devices. Previous work in this setting focused on the special case of a single pre-designated sender in a single hop network topology. We consider in this paper, for the first time, upper and lower bounds to these problems in multihop topologies with multiple senders. To validate the potential real world application of our strategies, we conclude by describing a general purpose MAC protocol that uses the algorithms as key primitives, and validates its usefulness with a proof-of-concept implementation that runs the protocol on commodity hardware.