UC Santa Cruz

The fundamental design of medium access control (MAC) and routing protocols has not changed much in the last 50 years. This dissertation presents networking protocols that advance the state of the art in channel access in fully connected wireless networks, channel access in multi-hop wireless networks, and unicast and multicast routing in wireless networks. A re-invention of contention-free channel access is introduced that is highly efficient and more flexible than previous approaches in terms of supporting variable-length payloads and dynamic populations while eliminating clock synchronization at the physical layer. The MAC protocols proposed for multi-hop networks are shown to quickly converge to non-interfering transmission schedules and to be simple enough to be implemented using existing IEEE 802.11 devices. The unicast routing protocol introduced in this work is shown to incur less overhead than previous approaches and provide loop-free multipath routing an order of magnitude quicker than existing routing protocols for wireless networks like DSDV and OLSR. A novel label-switching technique (LEMUR) is also introduced to enable efficient multi-point communication in wireless networks that use shared broadcast links and eliminates the need for packet caches or cross-layer mechanisms commonly used in multicast routing protocols for wireless networks today.