A novel protocol for an ad-hoc, peer-to-peer radio network that provides
collision-free channel access with an emphasis on improving geographic
reuse of the frequency spectrum. The protocol of the invention is
executed on the reservation or control channel, and provides a method for
allocating data transactions on the data channels. The system of the
invention utilizes multiple parallel data channels that are coordinated
by a single reservation channel. The transceiver of the system employs
two modems to solve the channel reliability issues with multiple channel
designs, where one is dedicated as a receive-only modem for gathering
channel usage information on the reservation channel. High quality voice,
video and data may be transmitted. The reservation channel implements a
time division multiple access algorithm with dynamic slot allocation. In
a distributed manner, nodes determine geographic reuse of slots based on
channel quality extracted from the modem. Signal quality calculations are
used to determine the likelihood of a slot reuse causing destructive
interference within a node's neighborhood. Requests for slot usage are
compared with the known traffic pattern and accepted or rejected by nodes
within RF signal range based on the signal quality calculations.