Design and Implementation of Adaptive MAC Framework for UAV Ad Hoc Networks

Due to the agility and low-cost, small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) has recently captured great attention of academia and industry. However, since the capability limitation of single device, an ad hoc network formed by small UAVs is very promising. But compared to ordinary ad hoc networks, because of the unmanned characteristic and the diversity of missions, the protocols of UAV ad hoc networks require higher adaptive ability, i.e., the MAC protocol. In this paper, first, we verify that different MAC protocols have respective performance advantage under various network scenarios during the UAV reconnaissance mission. Then, we propose an adaptive MAC framework which allows multiple MAC protocols to switch mutually based on some kind of information you want. After that, in order to demonstrate this framework we design an adaptive MAC protocol called CT-MAC following the proposed framework. CT-MAC allows UAVs to switch between CSMA and TDMA based on their own positions when performing reconnaissance mission. Finally, we implement CT-MAC with Raspberry Pi and MDS Radio. The experiment results show that CT-MAC can always keep desirable performance compared to single MAC protocol through the fast and transparent MAC switching and the proposed adaptive MAC framework is feasible and effective.