Subject: Re: Communication technologies in ad hoc networks (fwd)

From: Theodoros Salonidis <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2001 16:40:48 -0400 (EDT)

Hi Wenjing,

 Dr Ramanathan is right: there is no current commercial product 
for ad hoc networking that does local channel assignment in any
time/frequency/code domain, at least in the 802.11 context. The reason
is probably that this is a difficult problem to solve in a practical 
way even if it would offer better performance under some assumptions. 

The Bluetooth technology is a potential candidate for ad hoc networking
and structurally relies on multiple channels called piconets.
In this case, necessity (not even efficiency) reasons bring 
the need to address the local multiple channel assignment problem, in
order for Bluetooth to be able to operate in a multihop setting. 

In the paper 

T. Salonidis, P. Bhagwat, L. Tassiulas and R. LaMaire,
"Distributed Topology Construction for Bluetooth Personal Area Networks"
in proceedings of Infocom 2001

the issue of how to establish a multiple channel Bluetooth network
is addressed by introducing a practical distributed protocol that
operates in real time.

I hope it will answer some of your questions regarding local
multiple channel assignment at least in the 
context of the Bluetooth technology.

Regards

  Theodoros