RTRG: Reschedule Trigger to optimize rescheduling frequency for schedule based MAC schemes

Schedule based MAC schemes are not flexible to dynamic network and traffic scenarios. Thus, these schemes can not be applied to real life applications which operate under dynamic conditions. The inflexibility is due to inherent characteristics of schedule based approach and depends mainly on the rescheduling and slot allocation strategies employed. Most schedule based schemes carry out slot allocation only once during the set up phase, or periodically after fixed time interval. Both of these approaches are not optimal. In this paper we propose a mechanism to determine the optimal periodicity of slot re-allocation based on traffic pattern. In our knowledge no other such mechanism exists. Through simulations we show that the proposed mechanism incurs lower overheads compared to both one-time and periodic (fixed period) slot allocation. The performance is improved substantially, by up to 40%.