TDMA-based multi-hop resource reservation protocol for real-time applications in tactical mobile adhoc network

This paper proposes a new time division multiple access (TDMA) based multi-hop resource(slots) reservation protocol (TMRR) for tactical mobile adhoc networks (T-MANET). TMRR lets a node reserve the channel resource for multi-hop packet transmission in consecutive order, so that the packet transmission between a source node and a multi-hop away destination node is possible within a superframe. This paper evaluates the performance of the proposed protocol via OPNET simulation in terms of the average end-to-end delay and the average throughput in both static and mobile environments. And this paper compares it to that of the Evolutionary-TDMA (E-TDMA) which is a representative reservation-based medium access control (MAC) protocol considering node mobility in MANET. According to the simulation results of the single-hop scenarios, TMRR gives better packet throughput and delay performance than E-TDMA as the offered traffic is increased. For the multi-hop scenarios, the average end-to-end delay of TMRR nodes meets the multi-hop end-to-end delay requirements because a node can transmit the packets to a multi-hop away node within a superframe.