Mobile Awareness Based Hybrid MAC Protocol for Tactical Data Link Networks

Most traditional MAC protocols proposed for wireless networks assume static Network Units (shorted as NUs), which usually lead to performance degradation in mobile scenarios. In this paper, a novel hybrid MAC protocol, called MA-MAC, was presented for multi-hop mobile Tactical Data Link networks based upon the mobile characteristics of NUs. The basic point of MA-MAC is that the transmit mode of each NU can be switched between reservation and contention-based adaptively according to the mobile awareness. The design objective of MA-MAC is to reduce the high initial overhead of a creating new connection as a result of the dynamic in network. In addition, MA-MAC adopts a dynamic frame length scheme, in which each NU maintains a local frame length adjusted by a power of 2. We verify the performance of MA-MAC by simulation experiments. The results demonstrate that the proposed protocol outperforms existing MAC protocols, like E-ASAP and MH-MAC, in terms of delivery ratio and packet delay.