Title: An adaptive reservation time division multiple access control protocol for robot inter-communication

Authors: Junpei Arai, Akio Koyama, Leonard Barolli

Addresses: Department of Information and Control Engineering, Yamagata College of Industry and Technology, 2-2-1 Matsuei, Yamagata, Yamagata 990-2473, Japan. ' Department of Informatics, Yamagata University, 4-3-16 Jonan, Yonezawa, Yamagata 992-8510, Japan. ' Department of Information and Communication Engineering, Fukuoka Institute of Technology, 3-30-1 Wajiro-Higashi, Higashi-ku, Fukuoka 811-0295, Japan

Abstract: In autonomous distributed robot systems, many robots cooperate together to carry out many difficult tasks that single robots cannot realise. But, in order to cooperate together the robots should communicate with each other. Therefore, the inter-communication among robots is a very important problem to be solved. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Reservation-Time Division Multiple Access (AR-TDMA) medium access control protocol which can realise a real-time communication among robots in a heterogeneous environment by using a reservation mechanism. Also, by using an adaptive time slot allocation method, the protocol has a flexible behaviour and can deal with the changes of number of robots. Furthermore, the proposed protocol can reduce the packet collision probability.

Keywords: mobile robots; communication protocols; wireless LANs; WLAN; mobile networks; robot communication; robot collaboration; multiple robots; autonomous robots; distributed robot systems; multi-robot systems; adaptive reservation; time division multiple access: medium access control; MAC; packet collision; wireless networks.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWMC.2008.019713

International Journal of Wireless and Mobile Computing, 2008 Vol.3 No.1/2, pp.4 - 11

Published online: 25 Jul 2008 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article