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Cooperative systems will ultimately carry out risk-related tasks and liberate mankind from mundane labor. The implementation of these systems implies the use of wireless ad hoc networks and their critical component - a medium access control (MAC) layer that satisfies severe timing requirements. Infrastructure-based wireless networks successfully provide high bandwidth utilization and bounded communication delay. They divide the radio into timeslots of uniform size, ξ, that are then combined into frames of uniform size, τ. Base-stations, or wireless network coordinators can schedule the frame in a way that enables each node to transmit during its own timeslot, and arbitrate between nearby nodes that wish to communicate concurrently.