David Murray

The multi hop architecture can provide greater range, spatial efficiency and throughput with lower power consumption than a traditional point coordinated design. In addition, the self-configuring, self-healing characteristics of this architecture enable previously infeasible network scenarios and applications. These benefits have motivated a significant volume of research. Unfortunately, the ISO networking model was not designed for multi hop ad hoc networks and subsequently, some cross layer interactions are necessary to provide adequate performance. This thesis develops and evaluates solutions to multiple performance problems. It makes contributions in the areas of routing, multi-hop contention and acknowledgement efficiency. The results are captured using a real world testbed. The first study evaluates three popular mesh routing protocols. The second contribution creates a novel channel selection mechanism that operates with multiple radios to overcome multi hop performance degradations. The final study shows the extent of the 802.11 acknowledgement overhead. A novel distributed proxy is created to eliminate this overhead in multi hop ad hoc networks.