Assignment methods for spatial reuse TDMA

Spatial reuse TDMA is an access scheme for multi-hop radio networks. The idea is to increase capacity by letting several radio terminals use the same time slot when possible. A time slot can be shared when the radio units are geographically separated such that small interference is obtained. In reuse scheduling there are several alternative assignment methods, traditionally, transmission rights are given to nodes or to links, i.e., transmitter/receiver pairs. We present a comparison of these two approaches and show that both have undesirable properties in certain cases, e.g. link assignment gives a higher delay for low traffic loads but can achieve much higher throughput than node assignment. Furthermore, we propose a novel assignment strategy, achieving the advantages of both methods. Simulation results show that the proposed method can achieve the throughput of link assignment as well as the lower delay characteristics of node assignment for low traffic loads.