Automatic Topology Discovery in TDMA-based Ad Hoc Networks

In wireless networks, topology information is often of great importance. Knowledge about the communication and interference topology enables more efficient and reliable use of the wireless medium, and some wireless protocols even require knowledge about nodes in sensing range. Manually measuring and configuring topology information of ad hoc networks is very cumbersome. This paper presents ATDP (Automatic Topology Discovery Protocol), a protocol for the automatic detection of communication, interference, and sensing topologies in wireless TDMA networks. Furthermore, the gathered information is distributed across the network using exclusively assigned TDMA time slots, thus providing all nodes with a consistent view of the network topologies. Experiments with our implementation on Imote2 nodes show that ATDP reliably detects topologies of multihop networks. The experiments also show that consideration of the detected interference links in a TDMA schedule significantly improves packet delivery rates and thus reliability of the network.