Adaptive-Frame-Based Dynamic Slot Assignment Protocol for Tactical Data Link System

In multi-hop self-organizing tactical data link system, some real-time message streams need more than one slot to transmit in a frame, and have strict rate requirements and distance constraints. It is very difficult to guarantee quality of service (QoS) in thus system. To solve the problem , we propose a TDMA slot assignment protocol, named adaptive-frame-based dynamic slot assignment protocol (ADSAP), which can change the frame length dynamically by setting frame length as a power of 2 slots. ADSAP assigns one or multiple unassigned slots to a node according to its message stream model. If there is no unassigned slot available, the frame length can be enlarged to generate unassigned slots, and if there is too many unassigned slots in the frame of a node, ADSAP can shrink the frame to improve channel utilization. Furthermore, we verify the effectiveness of our proposed protocol by simulation experiments. The results show that our proposed protocol can meet the needs of the information delivering in tactical data link, and has better performance as compared with the conventional protocols.