A cotton receiver for a cotton harvesting machine and a method of operation of the same. Outgoing and incoming packets are captured during execution of a communication application to measure a round trip time, and a communication window size of the transmitting source is estimated based on the captured incoming packets. The substrate may be produced as a block of dense material constituted by hard particles dispersed in a binder phase, wherein the dense material has been enriched locally with binder phase by imbibition. The scheduling architecture also includes at least one shaper timer configured having a time constant to define timing for the generation of the control signal without using a clock. Alternatively, a lightweight RRQ message may be sent to all or a number of the gatekeepers on the alternate gatekeeper list simultaneously.