Reliable, Adaptive Flying Ad Hoc Multiple Access Protocol: Based on Statistical Priority

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are of great interest to the military, industrial, and scientific communities, playing an essential role in complex scenarios such as earthquake response, firefighting, and tactical surveillance. UAV clusters are widely deployed to facilitate these activities, where efficient collaboration relies on highly reliable wireless transmission technologies. Despite tremendous progress in wireless communications, performance remains limited by complex transmission environments. To achieve reliable access for UAV clusters under such conditions, a Reliable, Adaptive Multiple Access Protocol based on Statistical Priority (RA-SPMA) is proposed. This protocol manages Channel Occupancy Statistics (COS) within subnets to enhance real-time performance, implements dynamic threshold adjustments by modifying access thresholds for frame queues of diverse priorities in real-time, and incorporates window adaptive backoff to address the limitations of binary exponential backoff in M/G/1 queue models. Simulation results demonstrate that RA-SPMA significantly improves packet delivery rates while reducing end-to-end delays compared to baseline protocols.