Unified Synchronously Scheduled Routing for Static Multi-hop Wireless Networks

We present Unified Synchronously Scheduled Routing (USSR): a combined pseudo-MAC and Routing layer protocol for commodity 802.11 static multi-hop networks. Considering a community wireless scenario, our approach leverages a centralized network “gateway” to intelligently route traffic through the broadcast wireless mesh. The centralized gateway schedules nodes on non-overlapping channels in order to minimize inter-node interference. This approach increases the overall capacity of the networks and allows for improved multi-hop throughput and fairness for nodes several hops from the gateway compared to traditional routing protocols. We make an argument for why the increased complexity and overhead is reasonable and demonstrate that such an approach can provide improvements in properties central to making multi-hop wireless networks more useful in real-world deployments.