The technology provides real-time packet broadcasting in a radio network using a medium access control (MAC) protocol that combines advantageous features of both centralized and distributed networks for energy efficiency with high throughput. Applications: For use in military radios and similar applications for groups communicating by radio.
The TRACE (Time Reservations using Adaptive Control for Energy Efficiency) protocol provides energy-efficient reliable real-time voice packet broadcasting in a single-hop infrastructure-less radio network but it can also be used for energy efficient asynchronous and unicast data traffic. Dynamic transmission scheduling and receive-based soft clustering via data summarization concepts of TRACE make it a highly energy efficient MAC protocol. Evenly distributed energy dissipation by coordinator switching and automatic coordinator backup features of TRACE guarantee the network to be functional independent of individual node failures. Information summarization prior to data transmission prevents nodes from wasting considerable amount of energy receiving unwanted data packets. Multiple priority levels enable the network to support multiple levels of QoS. Minimum bandwidth and maximum delay for voice packets are guaranteed to be within certain bounds regardless of the data traffic where these bounds do not...