A new type of portable MANET terminal with two modes of CSMA and SOTDMA

Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is a new multi-hop, temporary, self-organizing network composed of wireless mobile nodes. As a flexible and infrastructure-less network, it has great potential applications in mobile communication. However, contention-based MAC protocols in MANET such as Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) can't ensure a reliable channel transmission because of the access collisions. Although slot-based MAC protocols such as Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) can solve the collisions' problem, the network throughput rate of TDMA is less than CSMA/CA with small nodes. In this paper, the design and implementation of a portable MANET communication terminal are presented, which can support both CSMA and Self-Organized Time Division Multiple Access (SOTDMA) in order to take the advantages of CSMA and Time Division Multiple Address (TDMA) in different scenarios. In addition to the common functionality of text, voice and video transmission, it also provides emergency and military application oriented functions, such as network switching, situation awareness, data encryption, time synchronization, text-to-speech conversion, and network authentication and so on.