A communication system includes devices configured to communicate with each other through a temporal sequence of frames. Each of these frames includes multiple sub-channels and network information. Note that a given device is configured to select a first set of sub-channels to be reserved by the given device based on a first election technique in which a first ranking of a first permutation of a first ordered set of sub-channel identifiers is calculated. Furthermore, the given device is configured to dynamically reserve the selected first set of sub-channels.