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Pervasive Communications Handbook

In [28], Chen etal. presented an on-demand, link state-based routing protocol. The
proposed protocol can find multiple paths between a source-destination pair. CDMAover-TDMA channel techniques were used to calculate the end-to-end path bandwidth
of a QoS multi-path routing (Figure 4.10 that describes a reservation example where in
(a) the link state information are collected and in (b) the destination selected two paths
to receive data from the source node). The basic idea of this protocol is to reactively collect link-state information from source to destination. The information will be used to
construct a flow network, which is a network topology sketched from source to destination. If there are multiple paths between the sourcedestination pair, destination node
will select the path that satisfies its bandwidth requirement and replies back to the source
node. The protocol is able to produce high success rate for the RREQs. However, the
method used to calculate or reserve bandwidth is not clear. The scalability of the proposed protocol for large networks is questionable. In fact, all protocols that use TDMA
to calculate bandwidth are only efficient for small and low mobile networks.
In [44], Lin proposed an on-demand QoS routing protocol that also performs admission control. The QoS metric is bandwidth. Multiple paths are searched at the same time
between a sourcedestination pair. If multiple QoS paths are found, the shortest path will
be selected. Since the scheme is pure on-demand, there is no maintenance of any routing
tables and there is no exchange of routing information. The path is only discovered upon
request. Therefore, in large networks, this path discovery process may incur significant
setup times. The network is using a TDMA slot via CDMA channel allocation among different nodes, that is, CDMA is overlaid on top of the TDMA infrastructure. Hence, multiple sessions can share a common TDMA slot via CDMA. The process is carried through
two phases: control phase and data phase, as shown in Figure 4.11. In the control phase, all
control functions, such as slot and frame synchronization, power measurement, code
assignment, slots request, and so on, are performed. The amount of data slots per frame
assigned to a virtual circuit (VC) is determined according to bandwidth requirement. In
the control phase, each node uses pure TDMA with full power transmission to broadcast
its information to all of its neighbors in a predefined slot, such that the network control
functions can be performed in a distributed fashion. All nodes take turn in this process. It
is assumed that the information can be heard by all of a nodes adjacent nodes.
By the end of the control phase, each node should know the channel reservation
status and can decide which free slots to request, if any. Therefore, the available path

Time slots

Control
phase

Data
phase

FIGURE 4.11 TDMA time frame divided into two phases.