Improvement of Slots Utilization with a Stealing-TDMA Protocol for Ad Hoc Network

Using time division multiple access (TDMA) scheme to access the shared medium in communication systems has been well studied in literature. The major problems of TDMA system are how to efficiently schedule the time slots for nodes so that fit their actual needs of bandwidth and how to allocate an adequate time period for data transmissions according to the varied amount of traffic by time. Recently many TDMA schemes had been proposed such as the topology-unaware TDMA method, which uses the probabilistic method to access medium, to enhance the performance of TDMA system. However, this method would lead to heavy collisions while the traffic load and the neighbors are increasing accordingly. To tackle this drawback, we propose a stealing-TDMA (sTDMA) protocol using ACK mechanism to reserve time slots for solving collision problems. The performance analysis shows the significant improvements in reducing collision probability and power saving.