Medium Access Control (MAC) plays an integral role in any wireless network. The broadcast nature of the medium requires that the communication channel be shared by adjacent nodes whose channel accesses must be coordinated to avoid collisions. This coordination proves difficult even in stationary or centrally organized networks, and is further complicated when the nodes are mobile. Cover-free families are the basis of a scheduled approach to MAC that guarantees collision-free communication between any two nodes provided that each of the N nodes has at most a specified number D of transmitting neighbours. The identity of the neighbours is not relevant, merely their number - hence this provides topology-transparency, particularly useful when nodes are mobile. Unlike popular contention-based schemes such as IEEE 802.11, topology-transparent schemes provide an absolute guarantee on the maximum delay when the neighbourhoods are small enough; indeed they also provide a guarantee on the minimum throughput. In this talk, we examine the combinatorial requirements of topology-transparent transmission schedules, and contrast these to locating arrays for identifying an interaction in the presence of many in screening experiments.

This is joint work with Charles J. Colbourn et al.

Bio: Violet Syrotiuk is an associate professor in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence at Arizona State University. She studies complex engineered networks. One of her interests is medium access control (MAC) protocols for wireless networks and their implementation on the new programmable radio platforms. Another major interest is in dynamic optimization of the radio and/or network parameters to find the best configuration given the wireless network's operating environment. She serves on the editorial boards of the Elsevier journals Computer Networks and Computer Communications, and on the technical program committees of major conferences sponsored by the IEEE and ACM.