A wireless token ring protocol for ad-hoc networks

The wireless token ring protocol (WTRP) is a medium access control protocol for wireless networks in unmanned aerial vehicles. It supports quality of service in terms of bounded latency and reserved bandwidth. This quality of service guarantee is critical in mesh stability of the formation of the vehicles. The communication of the speed and the velocity of the lead vehicle to all other vehicles in the formation had been shown to be sufficient for mesh stability of the system. WTRP is efficient in the sense that it reduces the number of retransmissions due to collisions. It is fair in the sense that each station takes a turn to transmit and is forced to give up the right to transmit after transmitting for a specified amount of time. It is a distributed protocol that supports many topologies since not all stations need to be connected to each other or to a central station. It can be used with an admission control agent for bandwidth or latency reservations. WTRP is robust against single node failure. WTRP is designed to recover gracefully from multiple simultaneous faults.